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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
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-XXXX*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
15...
16
17Extension Modules
18-----------------
19
20...
21
22Library
23-------
24
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +000025- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
26 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
27
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +000028- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
29
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +000030- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
31 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000032
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +000033- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
34
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +000035- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
36
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000037Build
38-----
39
40...
41
42C API
43-----
44
45...
46
47Documentation
48-------------
49
50...
51
52Tests
53-----
54
55...
56
57Windows
58-------
59
60...
61
62Mac
63---
64
65...
66
67New platforms
68-------------
69
70...
71
72Tools/Demos
73-----------
74
75...
76
77
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000078What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
79================================
80
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +000081*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000082
83Core and builtins
84-----------------
85
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +000086- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
87 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
88
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +000089- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
90 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
91 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
92 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
93
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +000094- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
95 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
96
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +000097- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
98 constant.
99
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000100- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
101 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
102 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
103 large), and to anomalies such as
104 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
105 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
106 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
107 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000108
109Extension modules
110-----------------
111
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000112- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
113 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000114 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
115 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
116 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000117
118Library
119-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000120
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000121- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
122 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
123 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
124 --swig-cpp.
125
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000126- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
127 it is set.
128
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000129- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000130
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000131- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
132 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
133 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
134 Closes bug #1039270.
135
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000136- Updates for the email package:
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000137 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000138 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
139 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
140 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
141 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
142 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
143 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
144 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
145 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
146 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
147 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
148 + Updates to documentation.
149
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000150- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
151 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
152 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
153 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
154
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000155- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000156
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000157- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
158 applications should use the getmember function.
159
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000160- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
161
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000162- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
163 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
164 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
165 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
166 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
167 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
168 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
169 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
170 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
171
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000172- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
173 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000174 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000175
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000176- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
177 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
178 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
179 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
180 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
181 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
182 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
183 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000184
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000185- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
186 the new public features (of which there are many).
187
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000188- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000189 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
190 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
191 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
192 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000193 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000194
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000195- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
196
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000197- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
198 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
199 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
200 options.
201
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000202- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
203 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
204 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
205 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
206 conditions under which non-string values work.
207
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000208Build
209-----
210
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000211- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
212 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
213 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
214
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000215- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
216 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
217 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
218 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
219 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000220
221C API
222-----
223
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000224- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
225 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
226
227- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
228
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000229- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
230 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
231 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
232 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
233 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
234 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
235 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
236 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
237 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
238
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000239- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
240
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000241- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
242 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
243 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000244
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000245Tests
246-----
247
248- test__locale ported to unittest
249
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000250Mac
251---
252
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000253- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
254 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
255 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000256
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000257Tools/Demos
258-----------
259
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000260- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
261 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
262 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
263 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
264 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000265
266
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000267What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
268=================================
269
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000270*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000271
272Core and builtins
273-----------------
274
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000275- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000276 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
277
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000278- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
279 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
280 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
281 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
282 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
283 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
284 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
285 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000286 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
287 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
288 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
289 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
290 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000291
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000292- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
293 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
294 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
295 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
296 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
297
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000298- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
299
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000300- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
301 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
302
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000303- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
304 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
305 modified the list.
306
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000307- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
308 functions is now writable.
309
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000310- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
311 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
312 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
313 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
314
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000315- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
316 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
317 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
318 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
319 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000320
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000321- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
322 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
323
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000324Extension modules
325-----------------
326
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000327- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
328
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000329- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
330 data.
331
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000332- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
333 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
334 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
335 supposed to have been truncated away.
336
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000337- Added socket.socketpair().
338
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000339- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
340 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
341
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000342- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000343 versions of Python, have now been removed.
344
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000345Library
346-------
347
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000348- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000349 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000350
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000351- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
352 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
353
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000354- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
355 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
356
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000357- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
358
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000359- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
360 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000361
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000362- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
363 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
364
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000365- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
366
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000367- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
368
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000369- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
370
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000371- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
372 Percivall.
373
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000374- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
375 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
376
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000377- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
378 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
379 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000380 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000381
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000382- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
383 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
384 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
385 and exponent.
386
387- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
388
389- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
390 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
391 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
392
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000393- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
394 to the readline module.
395
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000396- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000397 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
398 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000399
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000400- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
401 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
402 contains symlinks.
403
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000404- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
405 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
406
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000407- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
408 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
409 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
410
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000411- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
412 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
413 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
414 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
415 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
416 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
417 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
418 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
419 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
420 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
421 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
422 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
423 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
424
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000425- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
426
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000427Tools/Demos
428-----------
429
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000430- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
431 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
432
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000433- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
434
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000435Build
436-----
437
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000438- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
439 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
440 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
441 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
442 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
443 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
444 plans to do so.
445
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000446- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
447 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
448
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000449- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
450 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
451
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000452- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
453 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
454
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000455- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
456 GNU/k*BSD systems.
457
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000458- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
459 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
460
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000461C API
462-----
463
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000464..
465
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000466Documentation
467-------------
468
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000469- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
470 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
471
472- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
473 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
474 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000475
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000476New platforms
477-------------
478
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000479- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
480
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000481Tests
482-----
483
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000484..
485
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000486Windows
487-------
488
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000489- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
490 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
491 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
492 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
493 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
494 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
495 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
496 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
497 the problem.
498
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000499Mac
500---
501
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000502..
503
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000504
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000505What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
506=================================
507
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000508*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000509
510Core and builtins
511-----------------
512
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000513- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
514 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
515 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
516 sensitive code.
517
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000518- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000519 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000520
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000521 @staticmethod
522 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000523
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000524 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000525
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000526- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
527 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
528 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
529 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
530 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
531 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
532 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
533 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
534 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
535 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
536 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
537
538 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
539 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
540 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
541 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
542 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
543 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
544 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
545
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000546- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
547 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
548
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000549- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000550 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000551
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000552- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000553 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000554 which was missing for no apparent reason.
555
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000556- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000557 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
558 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
559
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000560- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
561 types that support garbage collection.
562
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000563- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
564
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000565- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
566 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
567 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
568 Jython.
569
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000570- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
571
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000572- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
573 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
574
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000575- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
576 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
577 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000578
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000579- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
580 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
581 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
582
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000583Extension modules
584-----------------
585
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000586- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
587
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000588Library
589-------
590
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000591- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
592 TIS-620
593
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000594- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
595 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
596 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
597 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
598 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
599 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
600 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
601 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
602 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
603 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
604
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000605- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
606
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000607- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
608 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
609 same as when the argument is omitted).
610 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
611
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000612- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
613
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000614- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
615 schemes are offered.
616
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000617- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
618
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000619- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
620 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
621 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
622
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000623- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
624
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000625- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
626 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
627
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000628- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
629 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
630 when dummy_threading is being used.
631
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000632- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
633 from a tarfile.
634
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000635- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000636 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000637
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000638- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
639 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
640 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
641 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
642
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000643- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
644 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
645
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000646- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
647 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
648 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
649 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
650 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
651 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
652 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
653 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
654 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
655 by some other method in progress).
656
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000657- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
658 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
659 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000660
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000661- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
662
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000663- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
664 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
665 AM Kuchling.
666
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000667- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
668 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
669 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
670
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000671- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
672 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
673 instead of unsigned.
674
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000675- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000676 no longer part of the public API.
677
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000678- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
679 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
680 string methods of the same name).
681
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000682- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000683 SF patch 945642.
684
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000685- doctest unittest integration improvements:
686
687 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
688
689 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
690 DocTestSuites.
691
692- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
693 that provide thread-local data.
694
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000695- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
696 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
697
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000698- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
699
700- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
701 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
702 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
703
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000704- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
705
706 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
707 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
708 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000709
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000710 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
711 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
712 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
713 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
714
715 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
716 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
717
718 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
719 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
720 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
721 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
722
723 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
724 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
725 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
726 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
727 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
728
729 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
730 wrapping help output.
731
732 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
733 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
734 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000735
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000736C API
737-----
738
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000739- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
740 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
741 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
742 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
743 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
744 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
745 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
746 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
747 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
748 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
749 its visible semantics have not changed.
750
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000751- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
752 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
753
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000754Documentation
755-------------
756
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000757- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000758
759 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000760 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000761
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000762 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000763
764 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
765
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000766- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000767
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000768Tests
769-----
770
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000771- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000772 platforms that use the Makefile.
773
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000774- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
775 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
776 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
777
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000778
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000779What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
780=================================
781
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000782*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000783
784Core and builtins
785-----------------
786
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000787- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
788 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
789 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
790 objects now (one object instead of three).
791
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000792- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
793 Windows DLLs.
794
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000795- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
796 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000797
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000798- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
799 a new .pyc magic.
800
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000801- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
802 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
803 be there.
804
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000805- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
806 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
807 the LC_NUMERIC category.
808
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000809- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
810 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
811 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
812
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000813- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
814
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000815- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
816 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
817 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000818
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000819- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
820 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
821
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000822- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
823
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000824- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000825 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000826
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000827- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
828
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000829- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
830
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000831- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
832 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
833
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000834- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
835 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
836 Fixes bug #858016 .
837
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000838- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
839 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
840 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
841
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000842- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
843 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
844 improves their performance (about 35%).
845
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000846- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
847 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
848 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
849
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000850- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
851 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
852 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
853 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
854
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000855- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
856 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
857 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
858 length is not known).
859
860- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
861 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000862 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
863 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000864 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
865
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000866- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
867 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
868
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000869- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
870 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
871 keyword arguments.
872
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000873- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
874 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
875 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
876
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000877- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
878 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
879 cases.
880
881- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
882 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
883 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
884 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
885 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
886 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
887 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
888 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
889 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
890 a release build.
891
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000892- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
893 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
894
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000895- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000896 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000897
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000898- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
899 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
900 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
901 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
902 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
903 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
904 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
905 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
906 destroyed.
907
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000908- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
909 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
910 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
911 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
912 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
913 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
914 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
915 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
916
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000917- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
918 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
919 character other than a space.
920
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000921- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
922 by the function object or by the method object, the function
923 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
924 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
925 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
926 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
927 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
928 attributes with the same name.
929
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000930- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
931 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
932 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
933 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
934 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
935 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
936 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
937 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
938 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
939 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
940 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
941 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
942 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
943 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000944
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000945- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
946 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
947 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
948 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
949 This has been repaired.
950
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000951- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
952
953- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
954
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000955- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
956 over a sequence.
957
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000958- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000959 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000960
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000961- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
962
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000963- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
964 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
965 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
966 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
967 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
968 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
969 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
970 records with equal keys is unchanged).
971
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000972- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
973 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
974 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
975
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000976- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
977 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
978 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
979 freelist.
980
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000981- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
982 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
983
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000984- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
985 number.
986
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000987- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
988 a TypeError exception.
989
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000990- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
991 820195.
992
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000993- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
994 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
995 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
996
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000997- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000998 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
999 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001000
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001001- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1002 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1003 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1004
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001005- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1006 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001007 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001008
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001009- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001010 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1011 the first call.
1012
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001013
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001014Extension modules
1015-----------------
1016
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001017- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1018 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1019
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001020- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1021 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1022 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1023 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1024 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1025 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1026 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001027
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001028- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1029
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001030- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1031
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001032- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1033 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1034
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001035- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1036 fewer false positives.
1037
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001038- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1039 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1040
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001041- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001042 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1043
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001044- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001045 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001046 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001047 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1048 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001049
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001050- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1051 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1052 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1053 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1054
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001055- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1056 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1057 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1058 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1059 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1060 #897625.
1061
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001062- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1063 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1064
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001065- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1066 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1067 and pops on either side of the deque.
1068
1069- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1070 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1071
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001072- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1073 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1074 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1075 other functions that expect a function argument.
1076
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001077- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1078
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001079- os.getsid was added.
1080
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001081- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1082 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1083 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1084
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001085- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1086
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001087- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1088
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001089- readline.clear_history was added.
1090
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001091- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1092
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001093- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1094
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001095- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1096
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001097- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1098
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001099- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1100
1101- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1102
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001103- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1104
1105- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1106
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001107- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1108 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1109 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1110
1111- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1112 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1113 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1114 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1115 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1116 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1117 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1118
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001119- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1120 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1121 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1122 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001123
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001124- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001125 iterators from a single iterable.
1126
1127- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1128 of raising a TypeError exception.
1129
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001130- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1131 as parameter.
1132
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001133Library
1134-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001135
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001136- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1137 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1138 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001139
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001140- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1141 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1142 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001143
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001144- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001145
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001146- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1147 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001148
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001149- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1150 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1151
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001152- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1153
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001154- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001155 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001156
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001157- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001158 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001159
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001160- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1161
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001162- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1163 on cygwin and mingw32.
1164
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001165- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1166
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001167- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1168 module.
1169
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001170- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1171 installation scheme for all platforms.
1172
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001173- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001174 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001175
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001176- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1177 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1178 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1179
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001180- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1181 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1182 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1183
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001184- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1185
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001186- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1187
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001188- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1189 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1190
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001191- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1192 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1193 type pattern with the same value exists.
1194
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001195- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1196 when run from the command prompt).
1197
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001198- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1199 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1200
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001201- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1202 default sort).
1203
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001204- Added global runctx function to profile module
1205
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001206- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1207
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001208- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1209
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001210- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1211
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001212- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001213 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1214 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1215 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1216 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1217 accordingly.
1218
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001219- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1220 decoding standards.
1221
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001222- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1223 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1224 called for all requests.
1225
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001226- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1227 they are passed to the compiler.
1228
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001229- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1230 indent, width and depth.
1231
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001232- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1233 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1234
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001235- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1236 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1237
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001238- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1239
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001240- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1241
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001242- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1243
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001244- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1245 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1246
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001247- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001248 for better performance.
1249
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001250- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001251
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001252- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1253 a string).
1254
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001255- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1256
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001257- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1258
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001259- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1260
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001261- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1262
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001263- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1264 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1265 list of fieldnames.
1266
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001267- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1268 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1269
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001270- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1271
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001272- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1273 empty lists.
1274
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001275- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1276 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1277 and shelves.
1278
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001279- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1280 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1281
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001282- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001283 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1284 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001285
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001286- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1287 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001288 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001289
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001290- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001291 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1292 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1293
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001294- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1295 and removed in Py2.4.
1296
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001297- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1298
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001299- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1300
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001301Tools/Demos
1302-----------
1303
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001304- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1305 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1306
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001307- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1308
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001309- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1310 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1311 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1312 destination in situations where both files are given.
1313
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001314- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1315 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1316 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1317 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1318
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001319- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1320
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001321- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1322 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1323 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1324 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1325 now.
1326
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001327- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1328 in effect
1329
1330- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1331 C-c C-h
1332
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001333- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1334 -d option was given.
1335
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001336Build
1337-----
1338
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001339- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1340 build under OS X.
1341
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001342- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1343 --enable-profiling.
1344
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001345- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1346 is configured --with-tsc.
1347
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001348- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1349 on AMD64.
1350
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001351- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1352 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1353
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001354- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1355 removed.
1356
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001357- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1358 supported (see PEP 11).
1359
1360- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1361
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001362- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1363
1364- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1365 (see PEP 11).
1366
1367- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1368 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1369
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001370C API
1371-----
1372
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001373- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1374 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1375 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1376
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001377- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1378 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1379 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1380 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1381
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001382- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1383 generator objects.
1384
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001385- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1386 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001387 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1388 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001389
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001390- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1391 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1392
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001393- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1394 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1395 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1396 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1397 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1398
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001399- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1400 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1401 about 10% faster.
1402
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001403- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1404 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1405
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001406- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1407 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1408 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1409 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1410
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001411Windows
1412-------
1413
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001414- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1415 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1416 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1417 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1418
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001419- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1420 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1421 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1422
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001423
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001424What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1425===============================
1426
1427*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1428
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001429IDLE
1430----
1431
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001432- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1433 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1434 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1435 context-menu actions.
1436
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001437- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1438 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1439 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1440 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1441 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1442 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1443 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1444 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1445 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1446
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001447
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001448What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1449=============================================
1450
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001451*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001452
1453Core and builtins
1454-----------------
1455
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001456- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001457 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001458 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1459
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001460Extension modules
1461-----------------
1462
1463- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1464 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1465 than once. This has been fixed.
1466
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001467- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1468 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1469 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1470 call.
1471
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001472- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1473
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001474Library
1475-------
1476
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001477- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1478 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1479
1480- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1481 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1482 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1483 restored.
1484
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001485IDLE
1486----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001487
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001488- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001489
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001490Build
1491-----
1492
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001493- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1494 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1495
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001496C API
1497-----
1498
1499Windows
1500-------
1501
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001502- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1503 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1504
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001505- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1506
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001507Mac
1508---
1509
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001510- Various fixes to pimp.
1511
1512- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1513
1514- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1515 more problems than it solves.
1516
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001517
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001518What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1519=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001520
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001521*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1522
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001523Core and builtins
1524-----------------
1525
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001526- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1527 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1528
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001529- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1530 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001531 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001532
1533- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1534 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1535 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001536 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001537
1538- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1539 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001540
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001541- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1542 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1543 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1544
1545- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001546 770247.
1547
1548- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001549
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001550Extension modules
1551-----------------
1552
1553- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1554 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1555
1556- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1557
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001558- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1559
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001560- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1561 contained within the _strptime module.
1562
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001563- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1564 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1565
1566- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001567 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1568
1569- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1570 the find_class attribute, if present.
1571
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001572- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001573
1574 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1575 (SF bug 763298).
1576
1577 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001578 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1579 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1580 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001581
1582 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1583
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001584Library
1585-------
1586
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001587- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1588
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001589- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1590 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1591 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1592 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1593 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1594 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1595 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1596 or Tester().
1597
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001598- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1599 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1600 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1601 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1602 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1603 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1604 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1605 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1606 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001607
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001608 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001609
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001610- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1611 weren't before was an oversight.
1612
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001613- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1614 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1615
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001616- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1617 when there are no lines.
1618
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001619- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1620 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1621
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001622- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1623 to child processes.
1624
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001625- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1626
1627- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1628
1629- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1630 xmlrpclib.
1631
1632- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1633 responses.
1634
1635- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1636 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1637
1638- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1639 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1640 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1641
1642- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1643 used as patterns.
1644
1645- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1646 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1647 than Tk 8.3.
1648
1649- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1650
1651- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001652
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001653Tools/Demos
1654-----------
1655
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001656- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1657
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001658- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1659
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001660- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001661
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001662Build
1663-----
1664
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001665- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1666
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001667- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1668
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001669- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1670 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001671
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001672- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1673 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1674 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001675
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001676C API
1677-----
1678
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001679- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1680 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1681
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001682Windows
1683-------
1684
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001685- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1686 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1687 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1688 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1689 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1690 Python exception ::
1691
1692 thread.error: can't start new thread
1693
1694 is raised now.
1695
1696- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1697 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1698 instead of from DLL teardown.
1699
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001700Mac
1701---
1702
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001703- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001704 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001705 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1706 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1707 the executable in the bundle.
1708
1709- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001710
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001711- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1712
1713- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1714 on Panther.
1715
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001716What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1717================================
1718
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001719*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001720
1721Core and builtins
1722-----------------
1723
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001724- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1725 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1726 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1727 with the -i option.
1728
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001729- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1730 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1731
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001732- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1733 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1734
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001735- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1736 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1737 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1738 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1739 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1740 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1741 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1742 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1743 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1744 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1745 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1746 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1747 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001748
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001749- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1750 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1751 embedded in a lambda expression.
1752
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001753- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1754 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1755 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1756 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1757 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1758
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001759- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1760 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1761 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1762
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001763- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1764 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1765
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001766- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1767 It's writable again.
1768
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001769- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1770 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1771 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001772 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001773
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001774- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1775 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1776 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1777
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001778Extension modules
1779-----------------
1780
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001781- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1782 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1783
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001784- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1785 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1786 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1787 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1788
1789- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1790 collection.
1791
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001792- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1793 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1794 unique within a single program run.
1795
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001796- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1797 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1798
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001799- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1800 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1801
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001802- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1803 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001804
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001805- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1806
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001807- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1808 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1809
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001810- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1811 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1812 for many BSD-derived systems.
1813
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001814
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001815Library
1816-------
1817
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001818- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1819 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1820 primary ones:
1821
1822 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1823 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1824 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1825
1826 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1827 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1828 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1829 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1830 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1831 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1832
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001833- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1834 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1835 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1836 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1837 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1838 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1839 argument.
1840
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001841- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1842 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1843 in the archive.
1844
1845- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1846 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1847
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001848- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1849 569574).
1850
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001851- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1852 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1853 no more.
1854
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001855- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1856 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1857 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1858 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1859 code coverage.
1860
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001861- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1862 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1863 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001864 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1865 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001866
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001867- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1868 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1869 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001870 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001871
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001872- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1873
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001874- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1875 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1876 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1877 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1878
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001879- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1880 handling.
1881
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001882- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1883 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1884
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001885- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1886 in socket.py.
1887
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001888- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1889
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001890- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1891 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1892 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1893 opener with proxy support.
1894
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001895- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1896
1897- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1898
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001899Tools/Demos
1900-----------
1901
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001902- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1903
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001904- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1905
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001906- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1907 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001908
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001909- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1910 files.
1911
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001912Build
1913-----
1914
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001915- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001916 different root directory.
1917
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001918C API
1919-----
1920
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001921- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1922 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1923 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1924 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1925 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1926 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1927 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1928 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1929 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1930 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1931
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001932- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1933 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1934 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1935 from Python.
1936
1937
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001938New platforms
1939-------------
1940
1941None this time.
1942
1943Tests
1944-----
1945
1946- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1947 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1948
1949Windows
1950-------
1951
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001952- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1953
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001954- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1955 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1956 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1957 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1958 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1959 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1960 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1961 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1962 that's what it's for.
1963
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001964Mac
1965---
1966
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001967- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1968 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1969 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1970 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001971- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1972 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1973- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001974
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001975SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1976------------------------------------
1977
1978430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1979598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1980622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1981661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1982683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1983697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1984713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1985724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1986727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1987729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1988730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1989731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1990732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1991733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1992735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1993740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1994744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1995745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1996747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1997749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1998751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1999753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2000755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2001757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2002760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2003
2004
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002005What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2006================================
2007
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002008*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002009
2010Core and builtins
2011-----------------
2012
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002013- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2014 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2015
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002016- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2017 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2018 and cannot be strings).
2019
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002020- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2021 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2022 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2023 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2024
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002025- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2026 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2027 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2028 Python itself.
2029
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002030- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2031 the referenced object, if it has one.
2032
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002033- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2034 the thread started at
2035 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2036
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002037- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2038 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2039 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2040 placed on a list index.
2041
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002042- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2043 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2044 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2045 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2046
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002047- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2048 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2049 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2050 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2051 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2052 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2053 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2054
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002055- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2056 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2057 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2058 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2059 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2060
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002061- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2062 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002063
2064- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2065 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2066 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2067 #693195.)
2068
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002069- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2070 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002071
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002072- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002073 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002074 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2075 interpreter executions, would fail.
2076
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002077- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002078 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002079 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002080
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002081Extension modules
2082-----------------
2083
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002084- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2085 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2086 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2087 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2088
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002089- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2090 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2091
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002092- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2093 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2094 and Greg Chapman.)
2095
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002096- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2097 recursively.
2098
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002099- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002100 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2101 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2102 leaks.
2103
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002104- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2105
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002106- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2107 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2108 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2109 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2110 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2111 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2112 #705836.
2113
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002114- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002115 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2116
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002117- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2118 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2119 See SF bug #692416.
2120
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002121- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2122 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2123
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002124- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2125 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2126 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002127
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002128- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002129 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2130 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2131
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002132- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2133 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2134 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2135 timeouts to work properly.
2136
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002137Library
2138-------
2139
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002140- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2141 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2142 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2143 future release.
2144
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002145- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2146 for querying platform dependent features.
2147
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002148- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002149
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002150- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2151 pickle protocol versions.
2152
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002153- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2154 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2155 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2156
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002157- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2158
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002159- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2160 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2161 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2162 modules.
2163
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002164- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2165 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2166 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2167
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002168- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2169 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2170
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002171- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2172 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2173 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2174
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002175- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002176 MS Office extensions.
2177
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002178- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2179 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2180
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002181- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2182 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2183
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002184- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2185 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2186 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2187 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2188 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2189 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2190
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002191- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2192 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2193 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002194
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002195- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2196 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2197 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2198
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002199- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2200
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002201- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2202 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2203 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2204
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002205Tools/Demos
2206-----------
2207
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002208- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2209 See the module docstring for details.
2210
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002211Build
2212-----
2213
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002214- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2215 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002216
2217C API
2218-----
2219
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002220- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2221
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002222- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2223 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2224 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2225
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002226- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2227 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002228
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002229 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2230 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2231 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002232
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002233- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002234 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2235
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002236- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2237 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2238 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002239
2240New platforms
2241-------------
2242
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002243None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002244
2245Tests
2246-----
2247
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002248- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2249 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002250
2251Windows
2252-------
2253
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002254- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2255 function.
2256
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002257- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2258 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002259
2260Mac
2261---
2262
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002263- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2264 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002265
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002266- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2267 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002268
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002269- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2270 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2271 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002272
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002273- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002274 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2275 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002276
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002277- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2278 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002279
2280
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002281What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2282=================================
2283
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002284*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002285
2286Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002287-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002288
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002289- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2290 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2291 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2292
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002293- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2294 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2295 (SF patch #664376.)
2296
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002297- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2298 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2299 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2300 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2301 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2302 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002303 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002304
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002305- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2306 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2307 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2308 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002309 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002310
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002311- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2312 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2313 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2314 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2315 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2316 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2317 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2318 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2319 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2320 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2321 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2322
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002323- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2324 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2325 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2326 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2327 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2328 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2329
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002330- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2331 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2332
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002333- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2334 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2335 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2336 case.)
2337
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002338- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2339 passed as unicode strings.
2340
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002341- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2342 See SF bug #683467.
2343
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002344- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2345 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2346
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002347- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2348
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002349- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2350
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002351- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2352 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2353 arguments.
2354
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002355- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2356 See SF bug #667147.
2357
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002358- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002359 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002360 See SF bug #676155.
2361
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002362- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002363 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002364 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2365 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2366 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2367 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2368 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2369 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002370
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002371Extension modules
2372-----------------
2373
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002374- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2375 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2376 tp_as_number pointer.
2377
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002378- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2379 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2380 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2381 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2382 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2383
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002384- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2385
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002386- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2387
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002388- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002389 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002390 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2391 patch #678531.)
2392
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002393- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2394 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2395
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002396- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2397 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2398
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002399- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2400
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002401- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2402 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2403 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2404
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002405- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2406
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002407- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2408 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2409
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002410- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002411
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002412- datetime changes:
2413
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002414 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2415
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002416 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2417 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2418 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2419 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2420 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2421 now.
2422
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002423 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002424 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2425 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002426
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002427 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002428 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002429 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2430 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2431 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2432 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002433
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002434 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2435 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2436 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002437 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2438
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002439 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2440 by a later example coded by Guido.
2441
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002442 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002443 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2444 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2445 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002446 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2447 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2448
2449 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2450 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2451 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2452 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2453 tzinfo subclass instance.
2454
2455 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2456 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2457 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2458 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2459 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2460 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2461 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2462 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002463
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002464 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2465 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2466 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2467 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2468 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002469 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2470
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002471 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002472
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002473 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2474 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2475 as a naive datetime object.
2476
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002477 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2478 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2479 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2480
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002481 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2482 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2483 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2484 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2485 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2486 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2487 comparison.
2488
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002489 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2490 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2491 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2492 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002493 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002494
2495 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002496
2497 and ::
2498
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002499 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2500
2501 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2502 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2503 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2504 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2505
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002506 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2507 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2508 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2509 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2510 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2511
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002512 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2513 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002514 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2515 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002516
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002517Library
2518-------
2519
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002520- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2521 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2522
2523- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2524 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2525 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2526 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2527 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2528 See PEP 307 for details.
2529
2530- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2531 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2532
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002533- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2534 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002535 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002536 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2537 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002538 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002539
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002540- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2541 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2542
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002543- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2544 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2545 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2546
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002547- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2548
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002549- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2550 exception.
2551
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002552- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2553 class.
2554
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002555- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2556 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2557 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2558
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002559- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2560 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2561
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002562- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002563 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2564 See SF bug #659228.
2565
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002566- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2567 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2568 See SF patch #651082.
2569
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002570- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002571
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002572- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2573 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2574
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002575- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002576 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002577
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002578- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2579 DOS paths from other platforms.
2580
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002581Tools/Demos
2582-----------
2583
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002584- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2585 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2586 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2587 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2588 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2589 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2590 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2591 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2592 example:
2593
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002594 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2595 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002596
2597 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2598
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002599
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002600Build
2601-----
2602
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002603- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2604 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2605 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002606 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2607
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002608 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2609
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002610- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2611 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2612 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2613 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2614 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2615 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2616 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2617 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2618 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2619
2620- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2621 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2622 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2623 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2624
2625- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2626 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2627
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002628C API
2629-----
2630
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002631- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2632 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002633
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002634- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2635 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2636 tp_as_number pointer.
2637
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002638- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2639 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2640 (SF #681367)
2641
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002642- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2643 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2644 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2645 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002646
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002647Tests
2648-----
2649
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002650- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002651 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2652 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2653 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2654 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2655 pydoc.)
2656
2657- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2658
2659- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002660
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002661Windows
2662-------
2663
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002664- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2665 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2666 time).
2667
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002668- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2669 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2670
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002671- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2672 release without strong cryptography.
2673
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002674- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002675 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002676
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002677- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2678 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2679
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002680Mac
2681---
2682
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002683- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2684 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002685
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002686- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2687 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2688 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002689
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002690- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2691 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002692
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002693- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2694 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2695 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2696 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002697
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002698- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002699 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2700 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2701 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002702
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002703
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002704What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002705=================================
2706
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002707*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002708
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002709Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002710--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002711
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002712- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2713
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002714- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2715 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002716 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002717 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002718 a different meaning than before.
2719
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002720- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002721 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002722 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002723
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002724- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002725 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002726 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002727
2728- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2729 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2730 and deallocation.
2731
2732- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2733 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2734
2735- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2736 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2737 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2738 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2739 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2740
2741- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2742 now detected by the garbage collector.
2743
2744- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2745 [SF bug 519621]
2746
2747- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2748 identifier.
2749
2750- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2751 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2752 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2753 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2754 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2755 [SF bug 563060]
2756
2757- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2758 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2759 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2760 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2761 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2762
2763- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2764 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2765 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2766
2767- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2768
2769- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2770 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2771 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2772 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2773 state of the slots would be lost.)
2774
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002775Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002776-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002777
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002778- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002779 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2780 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2781 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2782 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002783 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2784 Jython 2.1.
2785
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002786- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002787 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002788 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2789 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2790 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2791 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2792 these, see PEP 302.
2793
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002794- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2795 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2796 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2797
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002798- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2799 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2800 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2801
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002802- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2803 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2804 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2805
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002806- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2807 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2808 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2809 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2810 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2811 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2812 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2813 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2814 releases or implementations.
2815
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002816- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002817 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2818 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002819
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002820- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2821 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2822
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002823- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2824 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2825 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2826
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002827- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2828 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2829
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002830- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2831 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002832 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2833 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002834
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002835- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2836 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2837 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2838 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2839 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2840
2841 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2842 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2843 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2844 pattern.
2845
2846 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2847 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2848 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2849 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2850
2851 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2852 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2853 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2854 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2855 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2856 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2857
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002858- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2859 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2860 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2861 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2862 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2863 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2864 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2865 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002866
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002867- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2868 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2869 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2870 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2871 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002872 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2873 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2874 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2875 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2876 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2877 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2878 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002879
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002880- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2881 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2882
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002883- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2884 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2885 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2886 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2887 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2888 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2889 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2890 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2891 to Zack Weinberg!
2892
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002893- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2894 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2895 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2896 type. This has been fixed now.
2897
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002898- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2899 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2900 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2901
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002902- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2903 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2904 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2905 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2906 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2907 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2908 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2909 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002910 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002911
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002912- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2913 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2914 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002915
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002916- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2917 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2918 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2919 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2920 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2921 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2922 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2923 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002924 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002925 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2926 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2927
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002928- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2929 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2930 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2931 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2932 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2933 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2934 this.)
2935
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002936- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2937 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002938 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002939 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002940 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2941 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002942 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2943 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002944
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002945- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2946 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2947 currently running.
2948
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002949- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2950 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2951 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2952 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2953
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002954- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2955 as directory names.
2956
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002957- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2958 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2959
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002960- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2961 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2962
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002963- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002964 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2965 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002966
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002967- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2968 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2969 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2970 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2971 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2972
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002973- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2974 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2975 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2976 removed.
2977
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002978- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2979 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2980 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2981
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002982- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2983 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2984 to __debug__.
2985
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002986- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2987 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2988 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2989
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002990- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2991 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2992 deprecated now.
2993
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002994- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2995 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2996 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002997
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002998- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2999 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3000 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3001 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3002 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003003
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003004- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3005 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3006
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003007- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3008 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3009 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003010 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003011 is backward compatible.
3012
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003013- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3014 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3015 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3016 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3017 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3018
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003019- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3020 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3021 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3022 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3023 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3024 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003025
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003026- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3027 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3028
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003029- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3030 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3031
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003032- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3033 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3034 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3035 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3036 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3037
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003038- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3039 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3040 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3041
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003042- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003043 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3044
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003045- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3046 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3047 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003048
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003049- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3050 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3051
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003052- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3053 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3054 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3055
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003056- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3057
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003058Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003059-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003060
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003061- Added three operators to the operator module:
3062 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3063 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3064 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3065
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003066- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3067
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003068- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3069 archives.
3070
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003071- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3072 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3073 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3074
3075 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3076
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003077- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3078 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3079 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003080 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003081
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003082- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3083 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3084 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3085 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003086 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3087 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3088 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3089 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003090
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003091- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3092 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003093
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003094- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3095
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003096- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3097 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3098
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003099- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3100 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3101 supported.
3102
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003103- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3104
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003105- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3106 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003107
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003108- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3109 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3110
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003111- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3112
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003113- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3114 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3115
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003116- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3117 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3118 functions but callable type objects.
3119
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003120- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003121 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003122 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003123
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003124- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3125 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003126
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003127- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3128 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003129
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003130- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3131 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3132 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3133 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3134
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003135- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3136 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003137
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003138- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3139 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3140 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3141 and __imul__.
3142
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003143- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003144 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3145 is called.
3146
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003147- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3148 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3149 interpreter was compiled.
3150
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003151- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3152 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3153 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003154 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003155 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3156 1, not 2.
3157
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003158- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3159 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3160 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3161 limit.
3162
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003163- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3164 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3165 bug #623464.
3166
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003167- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3168 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3169 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3170 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3171
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003172Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003173-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003174
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003175- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3176
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003177- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3178 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3179 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3180 with Python 2.3a2.
3181
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003182- os.path exposes getctime.
3183
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003184- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003185 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003186 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003187 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003188 unit tests of floating point results.
3189
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003190- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3191 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3192 has been increased.
3193
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003194- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3195 executed.
3196
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003197- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3198 postinstallation script.
3199
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003200- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3201 test the current module.
3202
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003203- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003204 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3205 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3206 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3207 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3208
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003209- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003210 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003211 Ward's Optik package.
3212
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003213- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3214 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3215 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3216 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3217
3218- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3219 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003220 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003221
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003222- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3223 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3224 shelf are binary pickles.
3225
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003226- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3227 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3228
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003229- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3230 modules are iterators now.
3231
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003232- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3233 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3234 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3235 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3236 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3237 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003238
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003239- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3240 with their entity value.
3241
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003242- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3243
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003244- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3245 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003246
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003247- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3248 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003249 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003250
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003251- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3252 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3253 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3254 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3255 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3256 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3257 main():
3258
3259 import locale
3260 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3261
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003262- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3263 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3264
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003265- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3266 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3267 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3268 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3269 to the new standard.
3270
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003271- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3272 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3273 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3274 an extension to the database.
3275
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003276- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3277 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3278 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3279 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003280 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003281
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003282- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003283 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003284
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003285- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3286 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3287 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3288 bounded integers.
3289
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003290- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3291 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3292 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3293 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3294 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3295 in existence.
3296
3297 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3298 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3299 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3300 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3301 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3302 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3303
3304 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3305 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3306 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3307 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3308
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003309- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3310 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3311 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3312
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003313- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3314
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003315- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3316 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3317 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3318 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3319
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003320- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3321 argument.
3322
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003323- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3324 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3325 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3326 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3327 [SF patch 560794].
3328
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003329- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3330 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3331 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003332 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3333 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3334 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003335
3336- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3337 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003338
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003339- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3340 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3341 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3342 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003343
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003344- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3345 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3346 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3347 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3348 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3349
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003350- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003351
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003352- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3353
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003354- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3355 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3356 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3357 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3358 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3359 identical to None.
3360
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003361- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3362 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3363 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3364 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3365 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3366 results now.
3367
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003368- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3369 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3370
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003371- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3372 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3373 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3374 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3375 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3376 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3377 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3378 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3379
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003380- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3381
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003382- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3383 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3384
3385- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3386 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3387 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3388 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3389 and other systems.
3390
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003391- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3392 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3393 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3394 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 +00003395 work well with these.
3396
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003397- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3398
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003399- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003400 connections.
3401
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003402- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3403 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3404 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3405
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003406- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3407 sets
3408
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003409- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3410 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3411 name.
3412
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003413- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3414 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3415 passed in.
3416
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003417- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003418 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003419 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3420 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003421
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003422- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3423
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003424- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3425
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003426- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3427 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3428 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3429
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003430- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3431 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3432 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3433 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003434 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003435
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003436- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003437 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003438 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003439
3440- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3441 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3442 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3443
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003444- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003445 the value of its expression argument.
3446
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003447- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3448 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3449 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3450
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003451- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3452 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3453 skipstone browser was included.
3454
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003455- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3456 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3457
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003458Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003459-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003460
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003461- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3462 names in addition to accepting file names.
3463
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003464- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3465 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3466 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3467 still used and useful.)
3468
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003469- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3470 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3471 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3472 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003473
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003474- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3475 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3476 the generated binary.
3477
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003478Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003479-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003480
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003481- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3482
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003483- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3484 except in the hands of experts.
3485
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003486- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003487 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3488 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3489 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003490
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003491- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3492 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3493 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3494 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3495 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3496 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3497 builds.
3498
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003499- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3500 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3501 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3502 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3503 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3504 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3505 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3506 new type.
3507
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003508- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003509
3510 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3511 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3512 positive infinities.
3513
3514 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3515 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3516 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3517 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3518 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3519 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3520 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3521
3522 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3523
3524 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3525
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003526- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3527 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3528 size of the executable.
3529
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003530- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3531 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3532 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3533 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003534
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003535- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3536
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003537- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3538 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3539 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003540
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003541- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3542 well as Unix.
3543
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003544- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3545 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3546 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3547 modules in the README file for details.
3548
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003549C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003550-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003551
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003552- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3553 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003554 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003555 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003556 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003557
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003558- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3559 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3560 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3561 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3562 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3563 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003564 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003565 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3566 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3567 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3568 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3569 aligned.)
3570
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003571- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3572 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3573 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3574
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003575- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3576 level.
3577
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003578- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3579 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3580 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3581 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3582 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3583
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003584- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3585 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3586 code.
3587
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003588- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3589 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3590 adjusting for negative indices.
3591
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003592- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3593 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3594 object.
3595
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003596- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3597 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3598 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3599
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003600- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3601 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003602
3603- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3604
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003605- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3606 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3607 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3608 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3609
3610- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3611
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003612- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003613
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003614- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003615 without going through the buffer API.
3616
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003617- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003618
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003619- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3620 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3621 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3622 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3623
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003624- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3625 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3626
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003627- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003628 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3629
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003630New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003631-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003632
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003633- OpenVMS is now supported.
3634
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003635- AtheOS is now supported.
3636
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003637- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3638
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003639- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3640
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003641Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003642-----
3643
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003644- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3645 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3646 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003647
3648Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003649-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003650
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003651- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3652 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3653 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3654 bugs.
3655 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003656 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003657 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3658 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003659 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003660
3661- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003662 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003663
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003664- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3665 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3666
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003667- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3668 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003669 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003670 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3671
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003672- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3673 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3674 use files" uninstall option).
3675
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003676- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3677
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003678- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3679 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3680
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003681- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3682 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3683 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3684
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003685- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3686 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3687 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3688 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3689 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003690 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3691 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3692 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003693
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003694- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003695 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003696 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3697 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3698 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3699 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3700 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3701 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3702 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3703 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3704 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3705 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3706 work around.
3707
3708- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3709 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3710 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3711 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3712 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3713 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3714 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3715 specified with O_CREAT too).
3716
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003717Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003718----
3719
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003720- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003721
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003722- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3723 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3724 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3725
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003726- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3727 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3728 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3729
3730- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3731 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3732 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3733 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3734 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3735 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3736 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3737 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003738
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003739- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3740 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3741 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003742
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003743- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3744 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3745 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3746 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3747 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003748
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003749- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3750 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3751 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003752
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003753- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3754 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003755
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003756- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3757 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3758 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3759 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3760 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003761
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003762- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3763 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3764 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3765
3766- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3767 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3768 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003769
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003770- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3771 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3772 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3773 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003774 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003775
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003776- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3777 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003778
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003779- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3780 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003781
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003782- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003783 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003784 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3785 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003786
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003787
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003788What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003789===============================
3790
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003791*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3792
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003793Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003794--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003795
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003796- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3797 with a custom metaclass.
3798
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003799Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003800-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003801
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003802- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3803 are proxies.
3804
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003805Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003806-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003807
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003808- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3809 very short strings.
3810
3811- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3812 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3813 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3814 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3815 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3816
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003817Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003818-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003819
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003820- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3821 close or delete time).
3822
3823- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3824 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3825
3826- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3827
3828- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003829 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003830
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003831Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003832-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003833
3834Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003835-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003836
3837C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003838-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003839
3840New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003841-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003842
3843Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003844-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003845
3846Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003847-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003848
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003849- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3850
3851- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3852 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3853
3854- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3855 deleted at process exit time.
3856
3857- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3858 in backslash.
3859
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003860Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003861----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003862
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003863- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3864 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3865 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3866
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003867
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003868What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003869===========================
3870
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003871*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3872
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003873Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003874--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003875
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003876- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3877 been extensively updated. See
3878
3879 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3880
3881 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3882
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003883- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3884 deleted!
3885
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003886- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3887 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3888 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3889 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3890 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3891
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003892- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3893
3894 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3895 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3896
3897 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3898 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3899 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3900 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3901 supported anyway.
3902
3903 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3904 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3905
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003906- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3907 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3908 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3909 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3910 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003911
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003912- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3913 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3914 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3915
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003916Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003917-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003918
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003919- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3920 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3921 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3922 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3923 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3924 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003925 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3926 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3927 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3928 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003929
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003930- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3931 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3932 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3933
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003934Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003935-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003936
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003937- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3938
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003939Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003940-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003941
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003942- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3943 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3944 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3945 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3946 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3947 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3948
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003949- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3950
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003951- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3952
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003953- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3954
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003955- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3956 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3957 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3958
3959- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3960
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003961Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003962-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003963
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003964- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3965 off a search on Google.
3966
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003967Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003968-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003969
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003970- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3971 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3972 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3973 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3974 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3975 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3976 other platforms should do likewise.
3977
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003978- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3979 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3980 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3981
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003982C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003983-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003984
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003985- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3986 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3987 producing key-value pairs.
3988
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003989- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003990 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003991 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3992 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3993 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3994 previously went unchallenged.
3995
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003996New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003997-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003998
3999Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004000-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004001
4002Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004003-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004004
4005Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004006----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004007
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004008- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4009 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004010
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004011- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4012 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4013 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4014 home.
4015
4016
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004017What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004018===========================
4019
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004020*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4021
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004022Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004023--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004024
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004025- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4026 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004027
4028 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004029 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004030
4031 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4032 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004033 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004034 This needs to be documented.
4035
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004036- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4037 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4038
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004039- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4040 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4041 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4042
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004043- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4044 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4045
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004046- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4047 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4048 class forbids it).
4049
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004050- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4051 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4052 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4053
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004054- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4055
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004056Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004057-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004058
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004059- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4060 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004061 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004062
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004063- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4064 (like 1 + '').
4065
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004066Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004067-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004068
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004069- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4070 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4071 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4072 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004073 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004074 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4075
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004076- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4077 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4078 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4079 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4080
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004081- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4082 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004083 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4084 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4085 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004086
4087- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4088 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004089
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004090- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4091 bytes on its input.
4092
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004093Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004094-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004095
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004096- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004097 convenience function.
4098
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004099- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4100 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4101 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004102 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4103 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4104 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4105 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4106 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4107 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004108
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004109- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4110 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4111 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4112 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4113
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004114- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4115 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4116 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4117
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004118- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4119 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4120 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4121 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4122
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004123- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4124 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004125 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004126 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4127 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4128 new -l and -e options.
4129
4130- statcache is now deprecated.
4131
4132- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4133 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004134 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004135 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4136 time properly taken into account.
4137
4138- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4139 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4140 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4141 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4142
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004143Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004144-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004145
4146Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004147-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004148
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004149- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4150 is built with libdb3 if available.
4151
4152- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4153
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004154C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004155-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004156
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004157- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4158 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4159 PySequence_Size().
4160
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004161- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4162
4163- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4164 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4165 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4166
4167- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4168 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4169
4170- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4171 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4172
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004173New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004174-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004175
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004176- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4177 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4178
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004179- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4180 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4181
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004182- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4183
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004184Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004185-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004186
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004187- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4188 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4189
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004190Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004191-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004192
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004193Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004194----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004195
4196- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4197 removed completely in the next release.
4198
4199- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4200 OSX.
4201
4202- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4203 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4204
4205- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4206
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004207
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004208What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004209===========================
4210
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004211*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4212
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004213Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004214--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004215
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004216- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004217 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004218 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004219 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4220 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004221 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4222 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004223 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4224 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004225
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004226- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4227 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4228
4229- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4230 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4231
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004232Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004233-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004234
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004235- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4236 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4237 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4238 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4239 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4240 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4241 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4242 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4243
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004244- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4245 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4246 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4247 example).
4248
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004249- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004250 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004251 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004252 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004253
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004254- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4255 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4256 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004257 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004258
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004259- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4260 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4261 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4262 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4263 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4264 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4265
4266 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4267
4268 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4269
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004270Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004271-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004272
4273- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4274
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004275- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4276
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004277- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4278 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004279
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004280- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4281 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4282 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4283 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4284 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4285 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004286 attributes.
4287
4288- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4289 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4290 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004291
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004292- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4293 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4294 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004295
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004296- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4297 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4298 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004299 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4300 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4301
4302- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4303 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004304
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004305Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004307
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004308- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4309 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4310
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004311- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4312 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4313 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4314 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4315
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004316- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4317 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4318 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4319 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4320
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004321 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4322 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4323 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4324 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4325 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4326 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4327 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4328 without losing information).
4329
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004330- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004331 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4332 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4333 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4334 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4335 module).
4336
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004337 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004338 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4339 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4340 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4341 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004342
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004343- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004344 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4345 encoding.
4346
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004347- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4348 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4349
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004350- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004351 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4352
4353- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4354 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4355 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4356 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4357
4358- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4359
4360- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4361 ON, and OFF.
4362
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004363- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4364 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4365
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004366Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004367-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004368
4369- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4370 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4371 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004372
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004373- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4374 been added: -X and -E.
4375
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004376Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004377-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004378
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004379- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4380 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4381
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004382C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004383-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004384
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004385- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4386 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4387 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4388 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4389 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4390
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004391- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4392 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4393 as long) arguments.
4394
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004395- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4396 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4397 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4398 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4399 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4400 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4401
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004402- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4403 input.
4404
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004405New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004406-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004407
4408Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004409-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004410
4411Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004412-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004413
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004414- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4415 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4416 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4417
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004418- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4419 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4420 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004421 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004422
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004423 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4424 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4425 import signal
4426 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004427
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004428 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004429 while 1:
4430 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004431 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004432 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4433 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4434 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4435 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004436
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004437
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004438What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4439===========================
4440
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004441*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4442
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004443Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004444--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004445
4446- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4447 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4448 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4449
4450- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4451 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4452 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4453 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4454 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4455 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4456 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004457
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004458- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004459 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004460 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4461 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4462 associate a docstring with a property.
4463
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004464- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4465 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4466 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4467 other built-in object types.
4468
4469- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4470 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4471 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4472 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4473 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4474
4475- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4476 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4477
4478- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4479 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004480 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004481 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4482 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4483 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4484 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4485 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4486
4487- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4488 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4489 class.
4490
4491- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4492 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4493 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4494 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4495
4496- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4497 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4498 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4499 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4500
4501- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4502 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4503
4504- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4505 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4506 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4507 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4508 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004509 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004510 with the same value as s.
4511
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004512- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4513
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004514Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004515----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004516
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004517- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4518
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004519- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4520 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4521 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4522 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4523 objects.
4524
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004525- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4526 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004527 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4528 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4529
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004530- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4531 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4532 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4533
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004534Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004535-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004536
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004537- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4538 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4539 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4540 by the instances.
4541
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004542- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4543 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4544 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4545
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004546- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4547 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4548 before the entire comparison is complete.
4549
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004550- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4551 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4552 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4553
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004554- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4555 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4556 getwriter().
4557
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004558- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4559 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4560
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004561- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004562 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4563 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4564
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004565- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4566 iterable object.
4567
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004568- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4569 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004570
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004571- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4572 authentication.
4573
4574- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4575 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004576
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004577- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004578 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4579 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4580 a sample driver.)
4581
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004582Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004583-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004584
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004585- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4586 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4587 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4588 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4589 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4590 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4591 kernel has large file support.
4592
4593- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4594 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4595 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4596 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4597 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4598
4599- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4600 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4601 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4602
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004603C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004604-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004605
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004606- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4607 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4608
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004609New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004610-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004611
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004612- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4613 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4614
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004615Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004616-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004617
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004618- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4619 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4620 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4621 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4622 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4623
4624- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4625 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4626 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4627 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4628
4629- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4630 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4631
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004632Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004633-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004634
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004635- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004636 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4637 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004638
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004639
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004640What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4641===========================
4642
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004643*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4644
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004645Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004646----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004647
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004648- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4649 big to represent as a C double.
4650
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004651- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4652 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4653 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4654 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4655 restriction).
4656
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004657- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4658 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4659 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4660 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4661 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4662
4663 >>> dir([])
4664 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4665 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4666 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4667 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4668 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4669 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4670 'reverse', 'sort']
4671
4672 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4673
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004674- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004675 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4676 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4677 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4678 OverflowError exception.
4679
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004680- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004681 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004682 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4683 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4684 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4685 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4686 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004687 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004688 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4689 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4690
4691 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4692 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4693 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4694 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004695
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004696- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004697 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4698 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4699 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4700 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4701 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4702 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4703 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4704 once it is created.
4705
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004706- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4707 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4708 (key, value) pairs.
4709
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004710- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004711 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4712 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4713
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004714- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4715 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4716 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4717 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4718 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004719
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004720- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004721 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4722 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4723
4724 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4725
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004726- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004727 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4728
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004729Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004730-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004731
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004732- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004733 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4734 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004735
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004736- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4737 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4738 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4739 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4740 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4741 in this area anymore).
4742
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004743- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4744 threading.Timer.
4745
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004746- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4747 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4748
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004749- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004750 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4751
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004752- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004753 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4754 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4755 converted to Python longs.
4756
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004757- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004758 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4759
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004760- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4761 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4762 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4763
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004764Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004765-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004766
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004767- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4768 division operators as per PEP 238.
4769
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004770Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004771-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004772
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004773- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4774 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4775 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4776 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4777
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004778C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004779-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004780
4781- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004782
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004783- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4784 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004785 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004786
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004787 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4788 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004789 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004790 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004791
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004792- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004793 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4794 module:
4795
4796 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004797
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004798 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4799 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004800
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004801 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4802 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004803
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004804 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4805
4806 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4807
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004808- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004809 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4810 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4811 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004812
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004813New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004814-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004815
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004816- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4817 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4818 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4819 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4820 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004821
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004822Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004823-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004824
4825Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004826-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004827
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004828- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4829 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4830 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4831 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004832 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4833 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4834 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4835 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4836 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004837
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004838- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004839 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4840
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004841
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004842What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4843===========================
4844
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004845*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4846
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004847Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004848-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004849
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004850- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4851 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4852
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004853- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4854 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4855 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004856
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004857- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4858 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4859 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4860 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004861
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004862- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4863
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004864- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004865
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004866Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004867-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004868
4869- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004870 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004871 the module docstring for details.
4872
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004873Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004874-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004875
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004876- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004877 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4878 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4879 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004880
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004881- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4882 Nick Mathewson.
4883
4884Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004885----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004886
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004887- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4888 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4889 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4890 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4891 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4892 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4893 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4894 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4895
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004896- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4897 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4898 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4899 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4900
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004901- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4902 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4903 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4904 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4905 come a long way).
4906
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004907- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4908 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4909 write filters for these warnings).
4910
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004911- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4912 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4913 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4914 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4915 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4916
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004917- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4918 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4919 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4920 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4921 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4922 older distribution.
4923
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004924Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004925-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004926
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004927- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4928 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004929 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004930
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004931- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4932 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4933 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4934
4935- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4936
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004937- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4938
4939- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4940
4941- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4942
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004943- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004944
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004945- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4946
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004947New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004948-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004949
4950C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004951-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004952
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004953- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4954 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4955 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4956 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4957 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4958 against buffer overruns.
4959
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004960- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004961 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4962 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004963 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4964 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4965 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4966
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004967- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4968 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4969 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4970 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4971 deprecated.
4972
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004973Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004974-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004975
4976- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4977 relevant is found.
4978
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004979
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004980What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004981===========================
4982
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004983*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4984
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004985Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004986----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004987
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004988- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4989 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4990 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4991 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4992 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4993 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4994 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4995 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004996 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004997 repaired.
4998
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004999- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005000 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005001 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5002 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5003 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5004 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5005 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5006 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5007 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5008 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5009
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005010- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5011 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5012 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5013 leading BMO character).
5014
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005015- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5016 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5017 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5018
5019 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5020 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5021 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005022
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005023 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5024 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5025 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5026 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5027 for various simple to use conversions.
5028
5029 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5030 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5031
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005032 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5033 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5034 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5035 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5036 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5037 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5038 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5039 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5040 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5041 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5042 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5043 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5044 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5045 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5046 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005047
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005048- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5049 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5050 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005051 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005052 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005053
5054 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005055 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5056 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5057 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5058 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5059 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005060 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5061 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005062
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005063 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5064 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5065 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005066 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005067
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005068- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5069 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5070 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5071 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5072 floating arithmetic,
5073
5074 x = 9007199254740992.0
5075 print long(x)
5076
5077 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5078 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5079 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5080 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5081 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5082 functions are of good quality).
5083
5084 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5085 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5086 algorithms to break.
5087
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005088- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5089 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5090 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5091 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5092 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5093 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5094 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5095 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5096 order.
5097
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005098- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5099 operation along the most common code paths.
5100
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005101- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5102 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5103
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005104- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5105 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5106 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5107 {}.update(UserDict())
5108
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005109- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5110 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5111 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5112 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5113 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5114 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5115 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5116 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5117
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005118- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005119 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005120
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005121 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005122 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5123 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005124 join() method of strings
5125 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005126 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5127 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005128 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005129 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005130
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005131- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5132 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5133
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005134- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5135 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5136
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005137- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5138 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5139 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5140 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5141
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005142- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5143 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005144 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005145 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5146 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005147
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005148- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5149
5150
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005151Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005152-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005153
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005154- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005155 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005156 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5157 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5158
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005159- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5160 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5161
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005162- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5163 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5164 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5165 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5166
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005167- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5168 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5169 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5170
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005171- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5172
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005173- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5174
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005175- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5176 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5177 that are still imported into string.py).
5178
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005179- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5180
5181- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5182 Now it does.
5183
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005184- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5185
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005186- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5187 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5188 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5189 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5190 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005191 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5192 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005193
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005194- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5195 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5196 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5197 'help(object)'.
5198
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005199Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005200-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005201
5202- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005203 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005204 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5205 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5206
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005207- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005208 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5209 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005210
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005211C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005212-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005213
5214- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5215 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005216
5217----
5218
5219**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**