blob: 19752f03c6e15e83854fd69f54e0d165260be906 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000011
12Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +000013-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000014
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +000015- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
16 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
17 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
18 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
19 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
20 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +000021 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +000022
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +000023- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
24 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
25 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
26 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
27 __init__: "def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass".
28
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +000029- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
30 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
31 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
32 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
33 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
34 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
35 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
36 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
37 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
38 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
39 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
40
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +000041- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
42 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
43 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
44 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
45 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
46 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
47
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +000048- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
49 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
50
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +000051- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
52 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
53 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
54 case.)
55
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +000056- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
57 passed as unicode strings.
58
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +000059- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
60 See SF bug #683467.
61
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +000062- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
63 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
64
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +000065- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
66
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +000067- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
68
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +000069- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
70 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
71 arguments.
72
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +000073- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
74 See SF bug #667147.
75
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +000076- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +000077 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +000078 See SF bug #676155.
79
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +000080- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +000081 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +000082 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
83 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
84 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
85 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
86 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
87 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +000088
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000089Extension modules
90-----------------
91
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +000092- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
93 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
94 tp_as_number pointer.
95
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +000096- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
97 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
98 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
99 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
100 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
101
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000102- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
103
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000104- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000105 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000106 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
107 patch #678531.)
108
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000109- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
110 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
111
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000112- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
113 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
114
Martin v. Löwis9789aef2003-01-26 11:30:36 +0000115- A new module _iconv_codec has been added, to expose the iconv(3)
116 library.
117
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000118- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
119
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000120- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
121 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
122 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
123
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000124- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
125
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000126- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
127 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
128
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000129- datetime changes:
130
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000131 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
132 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
133 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
134 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
135 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
136 now.
137
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000138 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000139 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
140 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000141
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000142 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000143 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000144 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
145 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
146 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
147 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000148
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000149 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
150 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
151 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000152 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
153
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000154 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
155 by a later example coded by Guido.
156
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000157 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000158 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
159 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
160 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000161 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
162 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
163
164 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
165 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
166 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
167 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
168 tzinfo subclass instance.
169
170 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
171 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
172 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
173 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
174 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
175 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
176 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
177 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000178
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000179 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
180 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
181 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
182 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
183 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
184 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to
185 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
186 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
187 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
188 as a naive datetime object.
189
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000190 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
191 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
192 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
193
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000194 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
195 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
196 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
197 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
198 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
199 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
200 comparison.
201
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000202 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
203 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
204 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
205 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
206 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example,
207
208 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
209 and
210 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
211
212 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
213 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
214 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
215 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
216
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000217 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
218 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
219 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
220 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
221 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
222
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000223 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
224 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000225 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
226 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000227
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000228Library
229-------
230
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000231- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
232 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000233 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
234 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
235 available from the os module.
236 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000237
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000238- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
239 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
240
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000241- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
242 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
243 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
244
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000245- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
246
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000247- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
248 exception.
249
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000250- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
251 class.
252
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000253- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
254 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
255 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
256
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000257- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
258 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
259
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000260- realpath is now exported when doing from poxixpath import *.
261 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
262 See SF bug #659228.
263
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000264- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
265 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
266 See SF patch #651082.
267
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000268- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000269
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000270- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
271 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
272
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000273- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000274 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000275
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000276Tools/Demos
277-----------
278
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000279- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
280 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
281 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
282 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
283 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
284 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
285 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
286 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
287 example:
288
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000289 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
290 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000291
292 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
293
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000294
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000295Build
296-----
297
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000298- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
299 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
300 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
301 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like
302 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
303
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000304- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
305 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
306 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
307 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
308 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
309 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
310 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
311 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
312 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
313
314- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
315 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
316 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
317 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
318
319- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
320 from the Tools/scripts directory.
321
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000322C API
323-----
324
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000325- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
326 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
327 tp_as_number pointer.
328
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000329- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
330 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
331 (SF #681367)
332
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000333- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
334 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
335 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
336 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000337
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000338
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000339New platforms
340-------------
341
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000342TBD
343
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000344Tests
345-----
346
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000347TBD
348
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000349Windows
350-------
351
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000352- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
353 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
354
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000355- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
356 release without strong cryptography.
357
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000358- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
359 absolute pathname.
360
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000361- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
362 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
363
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000364Mac
365---
366
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000367- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
368 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000369
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000370- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
371 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
372 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000373
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000374- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
375 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000376
377- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
378 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
379 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
380 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
381
382- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
383 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000384
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000385
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000386What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000387=================================
388
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000389*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000390
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000391Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000392--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000393
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000394- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
395
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000396- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
397 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000398 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000399 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000400 a different meaning than before.
401
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000402- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000403 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000404 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000405
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000406- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000407 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000408 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000409
410- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
411 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
412 and deallocation.
413
414- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
415 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
416
417- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
418 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
419 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
420 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
421 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
422
423- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
424 now detected by the garbage collector.
425
426- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
427 [SF bug 519621]
428
429- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
430 identifier.
431
432- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
433 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
434 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
435 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
436 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
437 [SF bug 563060]
438
439- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
440 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
441 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
442 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
443 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
444
445- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
446 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
447 not called. [SF bug #537450]
448
449- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
450
451- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
452 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
453 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
454 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
455 state of the slots would be lost.)
456
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000457Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000458-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000459
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000460- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000461 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
462 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
463 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
464 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000465 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
466 Jython 2.1.
467
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000468- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000469 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000470 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
471 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
472 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
473 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
474 these, see PEP 302.
475
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000476- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
477 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
478 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
479
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000480- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
481 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
482 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
483
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000484- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
485 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
486 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
487
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000488- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
489 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
490 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
491 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
492 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
493 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
494 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
495 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
496 releases or implementations.
497
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000498- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000499 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
500 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000501
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000502- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
503 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
504
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000505- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
506 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
507 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
508
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000509- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
510 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
511
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000512- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
513 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000514 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
515 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000516
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000517- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
518 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
519 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
520 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
521 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
522
523 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
524 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
525 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
526 pattern.
527
528 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
529 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
530 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
531 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
532
533 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
534 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
535 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
536 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
537 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
538 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
539
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000540- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
541 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
542 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
543 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
544 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
545 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
546 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
547 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000548
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000549- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
550 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
551 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
552 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
553 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000554 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
555 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
556 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
557 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
558 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
559 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
560 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000561
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000562- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
563 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
564
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000565- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
566 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
567 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
568 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
569 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
570 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
571 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
572 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
573 to Zack Weinberg!
574
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000575- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
576 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
577 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
578 type. This has been fixed now.
579
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000580- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
581 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
582 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
583
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000584- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
585 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
586 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
587 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
588 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
589 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
590 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
591 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000592 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000593
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000594- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
595 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
596 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000597
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000598- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
599 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
600 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
601 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
602 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
603 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
604 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
605 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000606 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000607 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
608 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
609
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000610- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
611 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
612 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
613 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
614 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
615 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
616 this.)
617
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000618- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
619 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000620 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000621 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000622 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
623 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000624 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
625 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000626
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000627- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
628 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
629 currently running.
630
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000631- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
632 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
633 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
634 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
635
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000636- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
637 as directory names.
638
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000639- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
640 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
641
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000642- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
643 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
644
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000645- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000646 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
647 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000648
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000649- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
650 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
651 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
652 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
653 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
654
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000655- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
656 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
657 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
658 removed.
659
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000660- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
661 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
662 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
663
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000664- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
665 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
666 to __debug__.
667
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000668- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
669 string to the left with zeros. For example,
670 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
671
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000672- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
673 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
674 deprecated now.
675
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000676- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
677 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
678 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000679
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000680- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
681 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
682 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
683 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
684 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000685
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000686- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
687 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
688
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000689- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
690 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
691 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000692 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000693 is backward compatible.
694
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000695- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
696 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
697 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
698 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
699 could access a pointer to freed memory.
700
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000701- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
702 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
703 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
704 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
705 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
706 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000707
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000708- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
709 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
710
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000711- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
712 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
713
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000714- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
715 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
716 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
717 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
718 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
719
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000720- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
721 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
722 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
723
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000724- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000725 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
726
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000727- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
728 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
729 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000730
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000731- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
732 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
733
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000734- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
735 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
736 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
737
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000738- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
739
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000740Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000741-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000742
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000743- Added three operators to the operator module:
744 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
745 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
746 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
747
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000748- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
749
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000750- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
751 archives.
752
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000753- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
754 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
755 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
756
757 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
758
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000759- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
760 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
761 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000762 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000763
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000764- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
765 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
766 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
767 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000768 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
769 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
770 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
771 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000772
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000773- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
774 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000775
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000776- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
777
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000778- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
779 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
780
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000781- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
782 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
783 supported.
784
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000785- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
786
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000787- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
788 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000789
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000790- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
791 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
792
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000793- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
794
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000795- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
796 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
797
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000798- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
799 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
800 functions but callable type objects.
801
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000802- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000803 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000804 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000805
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000806- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
807 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000808
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000809- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
810 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000811
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000812- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
813 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
814 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
815 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
816
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000817- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
818 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000819
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000820- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
821 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
822 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
823 and __imul__.
824
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000825- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000826 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
827 is called.
828
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000829- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
830 been added where available.
831
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000832- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
833 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
834 interpreter was compiled.
835
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000836- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
837 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
838 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000839 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000840 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
841 1, not 2.
842
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000843- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
844 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
845 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
846 limit.
847
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000848- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
849 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
850 bug #623464.
851
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +0000852- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
853 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
854 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
855 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
856
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000857Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000858-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000859
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +0000860- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
861
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000862- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
863 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
864 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
865 with Python 2.3a2.
866
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000867- os.path exposes getctime.
868
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000869- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
870 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
871 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
872 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
873 unit tests of floating point results.
874
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000875- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
876 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
877 has been increased.
878
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000879- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
880 executed.
881
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000882- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
883 postinstallation script.
884
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000885- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
886 test the current module.
887
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000888- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
889 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
890 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
891 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
892 this behavior needs to be controlled.
893
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000894- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000895 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000896 Ward's Optik package.
897
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000898- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
899 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
900 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
901 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
902
903- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
904 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000905 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000906
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000907- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
908 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
909 shelf are binary pickles.
910
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000911- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
912 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
913
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000914- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
915 modules are iterators now.
916
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000917- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
918 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
919 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
920 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
921 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
922 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000923
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000924- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
925 with their entity value.
926
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000927- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
928
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000929- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
930 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000931
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000932- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
933 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000934 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000935
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000936- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
937 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
938 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
939 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
940 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
941 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
942 main():
943
944 import locale
945 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
946
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000947- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
948 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
949
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000950- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
951 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
952 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
953 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
954 to the new standard.
955
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000956- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
957 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
958 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
959 an extension to the database.
960
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000961- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
962 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
963 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
964 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000965 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000966
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000967- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000968 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000969
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000970- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
971 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
972 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
973 bounded integers.
974
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +0000975- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
976 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
977 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
978 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
979 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
980 in existence.
981
982 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
983 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
984 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
985 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
986 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
987 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
988
989 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
990 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
991 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
992 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
993
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000994- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
995 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
996 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
997
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000998- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
999
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001000- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1001 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1002 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1003 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1004
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001005- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1006 argument.
1007
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001008- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1009 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1010 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1011 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1012 [SF patch 560794].
1013
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001014- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1015 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1016 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001017 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1018 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1019 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001020
1021- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1022 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001023
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001024- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1025 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1026 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1027 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001028
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001029- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1030 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1031 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1032 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1033 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1034
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001035- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001036
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001037- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1038
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001039- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1040 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1041 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1042 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1043 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1044 identical to None.
1045
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001046- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1047 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1048 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1049 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1050 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1051 results now.
1052
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001053- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1054 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1055
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001056- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1057 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1058 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1059 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1060 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1061 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1062 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1063 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1064
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001065- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1066
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001067- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1068 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1069
1070- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1071 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1072 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1073 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1074 and other systems.
1075
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001076- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1077 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1078 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1079 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 +00001080 work well with these.
1081
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001082- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1083
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001084- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001085 connections.
1086
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001087- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1088 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1089 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1090
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001091- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1092 sets
1093
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001094- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1095 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1096 name.
1097
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001098- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1099 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1100 passed in.
1101
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001102- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001103 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001104 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1105 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001106
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001107- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1108
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001109- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1110
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001111- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1112 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1113 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1114
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001115- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1116 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1117 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1118 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001119 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001120
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001121- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001122 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001123 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001124
1125- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1126 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1127 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1128
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001129- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001130 the value of its expression argument.
1131
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001132- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1133 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1134 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1135
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001136- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1137 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1138 skipstone browser was included.
1139
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001140- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1141 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1142
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001143Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001144-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001145
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001146- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1147 names in addition to accepting file names.
1148
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001149- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1150 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1151 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1152 still used and useful.)
1153
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001154- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1155 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1156 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1157 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001158
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001159- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1160 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1161 the generated binary.
1162
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001163Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001164-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001165
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001166- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1167
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001168- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1169 except in the hands of experts.
1170
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001171- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001172 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1173 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1174 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001175
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001176- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1177 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1178 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1179 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1180 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1181 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1182 builds.
1183
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001184- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1185 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1186 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1187 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1188 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1189 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1190 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1191 new type.
1192
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001193- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001194
1195 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1196 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1197 positive infinities.
1198
1199 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1200 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1201 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1202 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1203 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1204 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1205 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1206
1207 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1208
1209 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1210
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001211- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1212 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1213 size of the executable.
1214
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001215- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1216 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1217 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1218 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001219
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001220- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1221
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001222- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1223 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1224 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001225
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001226- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1227 well as Unix.
1228
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001229- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1230 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1231 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1232 modules in the README file for details.
1233
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001234C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001235-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001236
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001237- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1238 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001239 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001240 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001241 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001242
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001243- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1244 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1245 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1246 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1247 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1248 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
1249 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
1250 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1251 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1252 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1253 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1254 aligned.)
1255
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001256- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1257 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1258 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1259
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001260- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1261 level.
1262
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001263- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1264 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1265 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1266 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1267 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1268
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001269- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1270 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1271 code.
1272
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001273- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1274 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1275 adjusting for negative indices.
1276
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001277- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1278 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1279 object.
1280
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001281- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1282 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1283 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1284
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001285- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1286 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001287
1288- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1289
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001290- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1291 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1292 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1293 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1294
1295- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1296
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001297- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001298
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001299- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001300 without going through the buffer API.
1301
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001302- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001303
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001304- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1305 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1306 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1307 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1308
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001309- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1310 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1311
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001312- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001313 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1314
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001315New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001316-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001317
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001318- OpenVMS is now supported.
1319
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001320- AtheOS is now supported.
1321
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001322- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1323
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001324- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1325
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001326Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001327-----
1328
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001329- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1330 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1331 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001332
1333Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001334-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001335
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001336- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1337 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1338 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1339 bugs.
1340 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001341 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1342 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1343 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001344 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001345
1346- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001347 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001348
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001349- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1350 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1351
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001352- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1353 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1354 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1355 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1356
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001357- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1358 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1359 use files" uninstall option).
1360
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001361- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1362
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001363- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1364 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1365
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001366- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1367 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1368 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1369
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001370- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1371 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1372 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1373 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1374 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001375 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1376 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1377 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001378
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001379- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001380 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001381 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1382 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1383 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1384 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1385 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1386 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1387 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1388 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1389 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1390 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1391 work around.
1392
1393- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1394 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1395 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1396 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1397 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1398 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1399 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1400 specified with O_CREAT too).
1401
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001402Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001403----
1404
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001405- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001406
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001407- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1408 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1409 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1410
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001411- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1412 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1413 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1414
1415- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1416 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1417 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1418 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1419 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1420 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1421 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1422 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001423
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001424- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1425 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1426 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001427
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001428- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1429 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1430 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1431 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1432 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001433
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001434- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1435 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1436 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001437
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001438- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1439 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001440
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001441- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1442 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1443 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1444 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1445 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001446
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001447- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1448 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1449 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1450
1451- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1452 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1453 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001454
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001455- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1456 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1457 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1458 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1459 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001460
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001461- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1462 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001463
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001464- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1465 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001466
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001467- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
1468 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was but "ascii", like on
1469 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1470 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001471
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001472What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001473===============================
1474
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001475*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1476
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001477Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001478--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001479
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001480- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1481 with a custom metaclass.
1482
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001483Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001484-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001485
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001486- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1487 are proxies.
1488
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001489Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001490-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001491
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001492- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1493 very short strings.
1494
1495- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1496 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1497 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1498 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1499 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1500
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001501Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001502-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001503
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001504- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1505 close or delete time).
1506
1507- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1508 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1509
1510- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1511
1512- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001513 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001514
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001515Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001516-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001517
1518Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001519-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001520
1521C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001522-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001523
1524New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001525-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001526
1527Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001528-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001529
1530Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001531-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001532
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001533- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1534
1535- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1536 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1537
1538- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1539 deleted at process exit time.
1540
1541- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1542 in backslash.
1543
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001544Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001545----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001546
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001547- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1548 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1549 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1550
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001551
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001552What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001553===========================
1554
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001555*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1556
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001557Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001558--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001559
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001560- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1561 been extensively updated. See
1562
1563 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1564
1565 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1566
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001567- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1568 deleted!
1569
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001570- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1571 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1572 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1573 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1574 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1575
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001576- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1577
1578 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1579 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1580
1581 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1582 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1583 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1584 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1585 supported anyway.
1586
1587 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1588 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1589
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001590- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1591 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1592 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1593 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1594 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001595
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001596- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1597 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1598 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1599
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001600Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001601-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001602
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001603- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1604 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1605 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1606 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1607 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1608 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001609 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1610 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1611 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1612 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001613
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001614- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1615 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1616 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1617
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001618Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001619-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001620
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001621- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1622
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001623Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001624-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001625
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001626- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1627 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1628 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1629 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1630 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1631 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1632
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001633- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1634
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001635- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1636
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001637- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1638
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001639- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1640 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1641 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1642
1643- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1644
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001645Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001646-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001647
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001648- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1649 off a search on Google.
1650
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001651Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001652-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001653
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001654- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1655 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1656 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1657 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1658 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1659 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1660 other platforms should do likewise.
1661
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001662- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1663 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1664 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1665
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001666C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001667-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001668
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001669- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1670 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1671 producing key-value pairs.
1672
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001673- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001674 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001675 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1676 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1677 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1678 previously went unchallenged.
1679
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001680New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001681-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001682
1683Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001684-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001685
1686Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001687-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001688
1689Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001690----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001691
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001692- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1693 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001694
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001695- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1696 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1697 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1698 home.
1699
1700
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001701What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001702===========================
1703
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001704*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1705
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001706Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001707--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001708
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001709- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1710 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001711
1712 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001713 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001714
1715 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1716 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001717 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001718 This needs to be documented.
1719
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001720- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1721 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1722
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001723- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1724 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1725 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1726
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001727- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1728 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1729
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001730- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1731 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1732 class forbids it).
1733
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001734- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1735 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1736 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1737
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001738- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1739
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001740Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001741-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001742
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001743- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1744 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001745 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001746
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001747- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1748 (like 1 + '').
1749
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001750Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001751-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001752
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001753- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1754 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1755 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1756 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001757 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001758 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1759
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001760- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1761 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1762 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1763 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1764
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001765- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1766 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001767 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1768 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1769 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001770
1771- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1772 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001773
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001774- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1775 bytes on its input.
1776
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001777Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001778-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001779
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001780- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001781 convenience function.
1782
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001783- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1784 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1785 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001786 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1787 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1788 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1789 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1790 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1791 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001792
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001793- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1794 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1795 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1796 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1797
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001798- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1799 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1800 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1801
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001802- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1803 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1804 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1805 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1806
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001807- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1808 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001809 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001810 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1811 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1812 new -l and -e options.
1813
1814- statcache is now deprecated.
1815
1816- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1817 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001818 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001819 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1820 time properly taken into account.
1821
1822- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1823 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1824 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1825 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1826
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001827Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001828-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001829
1830Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001831-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001832
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001833- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1834 is built with libdb3 if available.
1835
1836- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1837
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001838C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001839-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001840
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001841- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1842 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1843 PySequence_Size().
1844
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001845- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1846
1847- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1848 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1849 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1850
1851- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1852 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1853
1854- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1855 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1856
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001857New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001858-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001859
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001860- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1861 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1862
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001863- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1864 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1865
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001866- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1867
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001868Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001869-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001870
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001871- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1872 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1873
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001874Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001875-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001876
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001877Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001878----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001879
1880- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1881 removed completely in the next release.
1882
1883- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1884 OSX.
1885
1886- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1887 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1888
1889- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1890
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001891
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001892What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001893===========================
1894
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001895*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1896
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001897Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001898--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001899
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001900- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001901 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001902 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001903 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1904 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001905 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1906 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001907 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1908 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001909
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001910- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1911 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1912
1913- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1914 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1915
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001916Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001917-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001918
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001919- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1920 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1921 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1922 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1923 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1924 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1925 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1926 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1927
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001928- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1929 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1930 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1931 example).
1932
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001933- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001934 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001935 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001936 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001937
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001938- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1939 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1940 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001941 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001942
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001943- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1944 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1945 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1946 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1947 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1948 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1949
1950 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1951
1952 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1953
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001954Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001955-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001956
1957- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1958
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001959- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1960
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001961- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1962 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001963
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001964- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1965 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1966 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1967 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1968 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1969 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001970 attributes.
1971
1972- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1973 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1974 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001975
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001976- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1977 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1978 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001979
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001980- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1981 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1982 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001983 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1984 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1985
1986- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1987 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001988
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001989Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001990-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001991
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001992- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1993 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1994
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001995- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1996 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1997 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1998 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1999
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002000- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2001 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2002 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2003 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2004
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002005 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2006 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2007 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2008 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2009 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2010 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2011 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2012 without losing information).
2013
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002014- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002015 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2016 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2017 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2018 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2019 module).
2020
2021 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
2022 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2023 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2024 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2025 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002026
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002027- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002028 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2029 encoding.
2030
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002031- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2032 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2033
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002034- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002035 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2036
2037- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2038 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2039 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2040 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2041
2042- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2043
2044- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2045 ON, and OFF.
2046
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002047- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2048 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2049
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002050Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002051-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002052
2053- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2054 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2055 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002056
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002057- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2058 been added: -X and -E.
2059
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002060Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002061-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002062
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002063- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2064 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2065
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002066C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002067-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002068
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002069- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2070 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2071 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2072 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2073 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2074
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002075- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2076 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2077 as long) arguments.
2078
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002079- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2080 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2081 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2082 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2083 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2084 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2085
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002086- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2087 input.
2088
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002089New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002090-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002091
2092Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002093-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002094
2095Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002096-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002097
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002098- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2099 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2100 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2101
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002102- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2103 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2104 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002105 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002106
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002107 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2108 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2109 import signal
2110 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002111
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002112 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002113 while 1:
2114 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002115 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002116 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2117 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2118 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2119 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002120
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002121
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002122What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2123===========================
2124
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002125*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2126
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002127Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002128--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002129
2130- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2131 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2132 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2133
2134- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2135 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2136 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2137 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2138 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2139 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2140 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002141
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002142- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002143 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002144 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2145 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2146 associate a docstring with a property.
2147
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002148- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2149 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2150 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2151 other built-in object types.
2152
2153- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2154 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2155 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2156 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2157 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2158
2159- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2160 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2161
2162- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2163 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002164 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002165 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2166 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2167 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2168 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2169 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2170
2171- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2172 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2173 class.
2174
2175- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2176 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2177 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2178 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2179
2180- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2181 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2182 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2183 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2184
2185- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2186 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2187
2188- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2189 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2190 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2191 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2192 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002193 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002194 with the same value as s.
2195
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002196- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2197
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002198Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002199----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002200
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002201- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2202
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002203- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2204 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2205 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2206 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2207 objects.
2208
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002209- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2210 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002211 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2212 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2213
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002214- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2215 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2216 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2217
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002218Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002219-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002220
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002221- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2222 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2223 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2224 by the instances.
2225
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002226- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2227 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2228 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2229
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002230- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2231 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2232 before the entire comparison is complete.
2233
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002234- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2235 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2236 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2237
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002238- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2239 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2240 getwriter().
2241
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002242- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2243 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2244
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002245- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002246 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2247 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2248
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002249- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2250 iterable object.
2251
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002252- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2253 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002254
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002255- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2256 authentication.
2257
2258- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2259 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002260
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002261- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002262 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2263 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2264 a sample driver.)
2265
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002266Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002267-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002268
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002269- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2270 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2271 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2272 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2273 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2274 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2275 kernel has large file support.
2276
2277- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2278 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2279 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2280 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2281 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2282
2283- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2284 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2285 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2286
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002287C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002288-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002289
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002290- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2291 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2292
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002293New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002294-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002295
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002296- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2297 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2298
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002299Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002300-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002301
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002302- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2303 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2304 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2305 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2306 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2307
2308- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2309 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2310 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2311 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2312
2313- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2314 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2315
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002316Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002317-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002318
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002319- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002320 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2321 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002322
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002323
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002324What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2325===========================
2326
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002327*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2328
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002329Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002330----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002331
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002332- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2333 big to represent as a C double.
2334
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002335- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2336 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2337 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2338 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2339 restriction).
2340
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002341- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2342 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2343 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2344 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2345 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2346
2347 >>> dir([])
2348 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2349 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2350 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2351 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2352 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2353 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2354 'reverse', 'sort']
2355
2356 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2357
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002358- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002359 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2360 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2361 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2362 OverflowError exception.
2363
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002364- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002365 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002366 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2367 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2368 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2369 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2370 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002371 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002372 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2373 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2374
2375 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2376 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2377 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2378 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002379
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002380- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002381 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2382 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2383 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2384 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2385 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2386 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2387 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2388 once it is created.
2389
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002390- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2391 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2392 (key, value) pairs.
2393
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002394- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002395 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2396 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2397
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002398- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2399 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2400 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2401 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2402 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002403
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002404- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002405 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2406 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2407
2408 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2409
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002410- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002411 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2412
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002413Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002414-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002415
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002416- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002417 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2418 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002419
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002420- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2421 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2422 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2423 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2424 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2425 in this area anymore).
2426
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002427- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2428 threading.Timer.
2429
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002430- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2431 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2432
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002433- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002434 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2435
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002436- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002437 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2438 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2439 converted to Python longs.
2440
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002441- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002442 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2443
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002444- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2445 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2446 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2447
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002448Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002449-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002450
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002451- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2452 division operators as per PEP 238.
2453
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002454Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002455-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002456
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002457- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2458 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2459 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2460 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2461
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002462C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002463-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002464
2465- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002466
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002467- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2468 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002469 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002470
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002471 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2472 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002473 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002474 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002475
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002476- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002477 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2478 module:
2479
2480 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002481
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002482 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2483 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002484
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002485 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2486 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002487
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002488 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2489
2490 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2491
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002492- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002493 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2494 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2495 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002496
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002497New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002498-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002499
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002500- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2501 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2502 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2503 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2504 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002505
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002506Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002507-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002508
2509Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002510-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002511
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002512- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2513 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2514 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2515 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002516 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2517 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2518 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2519 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2520 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002521
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002522- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002523 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2524
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002525
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002526What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2527===========================
2528
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002529*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2530
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002531Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002532-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002533
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002534- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2535 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2536
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002537- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2538 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2539 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002540
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002541- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2542 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2543 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2544 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002545
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002546- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2547
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002548- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002549
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002550Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002551-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002552
2553- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002554 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002555 the module docstring for details.
2556
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002557Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002558-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002559
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002560- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002561 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2562 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2563 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002564
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002565- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2566 Nick Mathewson.
2567
2568Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002569----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002570
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002571- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2572 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2573 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2574 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2575 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2576 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2577 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2578 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2579
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002580- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2581 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2582 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2583 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2584
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002585- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2586 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2587 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2588 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2589 come a long way).
2590
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002591- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2592 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2593 write filters for these warnings).
2594
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002595- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2596 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2597 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2598 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2599 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2600
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002601- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2602 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2603 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2604 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2605 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2606 older distribution.
2607
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002608Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002609-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002610
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002611- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2612 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002613 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002614
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002615- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2616 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2617 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2618
2619- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2620
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002621- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2622
2623- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2624
2625- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2626
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002627- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002628
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002629- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2630
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002631New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002632-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002633
2634C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002635-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002636
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002637- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2638 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2639 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2640 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2641 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2642 against buffer overruns.
2643
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002644- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002645 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2646 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002647 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2648 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2649 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2650
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002651- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2652 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2653 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2654 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2655 deprecated.
2656
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002657Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002658-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002659
2660- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2661 relevant is found.
2662
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002663
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002664What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002665===========================
2666
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002667*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2668
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002669Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002670----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002671
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002672- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2673 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2674 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2675 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2676 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2677 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2678 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2679 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002680 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002681 repaired.
2682
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002683- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002684 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002685 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2686 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2687 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2688 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2689 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2690 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2691 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2692 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2693
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002694- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2695 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2696 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2697 leading BMO character).
2698
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002699- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2700 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2701 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2702
2703 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2704 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2705 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002706
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002707 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2708 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2709 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2710 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2711 for various simple to use conversions.
2712
2713 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2714 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2715
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002716 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2717 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2718 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2719 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2720 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2721 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2722 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2723 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2724 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2725 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2726 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2727 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2728 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2729 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2730 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002731
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002732- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2733 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2734 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002735 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002736 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002737
2738 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002739 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2740 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2741 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2742 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2743 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002744 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2745 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002746
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002747 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2748 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2749 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002750 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002751
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002752- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2753 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2754 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2755 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2756 floating arithmetic,
2757
2758 x = 9007199254740992.0
2759 print long(x)
2760
2761 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2762 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2763 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2764 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2765 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2766 functions are of good quality).
2767
2768 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2769 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2770 algorithms to break.
2771
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002772- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2773 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2774 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2775 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2776 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2777 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2778 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2779 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2780 order.
2781
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002782- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2783 operation along the most common code paths.
2784
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002785- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2786 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2787
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002788- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2789 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2790 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2791 {}.update(UserDict())
2792
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002793- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2794 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2795 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2796 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2797 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2798 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2799 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2800 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2801
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002802- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002803 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002804
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002805 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002806 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2807 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002808 join() method of strings
2809 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002810 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2811 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002812 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002813 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002814
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002815- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2816 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2817
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002818- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2819 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2820
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002821- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2822 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2823 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2824 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2825
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002826- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2827 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002828 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002829 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2830 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002831
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002832- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2833
2834
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002835Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002836-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002837
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002838- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002839 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002840 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2841 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2842
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002843- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2844 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2845
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002846- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2847 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2848 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2849 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2850
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002851- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2852 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2853 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2854
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002855- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2856
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002857- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2858
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002859- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2860 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2861 that are still imported into string.py).
2862
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002863- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2864
2865- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2866 Now it does.
2867
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002868- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2869
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002870- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2871 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2872 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2873 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2874 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002875 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2876 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002877
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002878- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2879 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2880 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2881 'help(object)'.
2882
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002883Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002884-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002885
2886- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002887 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002888 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2889 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2890
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002891- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002892 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2893 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002894
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002895C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002896-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002897
2898- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2899 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002900
2901----
2902
2903**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**