blob: 637ca2eb130ae91a8d1040a7ac731387b7521a62 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000015- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
16 serializing floats.
17
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000018- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
19 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
20 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
21
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000022- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
23 278.
24
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000025- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
26 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
27 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
28 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
29 to the base class has been moved the prroper nb_* magic slot and out of
30 PyNumber_*().
31 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
32
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +000033- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
34 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
35 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
36 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
37
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000038- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
39 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
40 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
41 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
42 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
43
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000044- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
45 disabled caused a crash.
46
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000047- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
48 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
49
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000050- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
51 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
52
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000053- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
54
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000055- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000056 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
57 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
58 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000059
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000060- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
61
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000062- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
63 returning None.
64
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000065- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
66 ('\') with a specific error message.
67
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000068- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
69
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000070- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
71 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
72
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000073- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000074 an ferror() call.
75
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000076- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
77 list.sort().
78
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000079- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
80 (2+3) --> (5).
81
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000082- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
83
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000084- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
85 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000086
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000087- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
88 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
89 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
90
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000091Extension Modules
92-----------------
93
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +000094- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
95
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +000096- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
97 if available on the platform.
98
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +000099- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
100 available on the platform.
101
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000102- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
103 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
104
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000105- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
106
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000107- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
108 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
109 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
110
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000111- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
112
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000113- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
114 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
115
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000116- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
117 file size.
118
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000119- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
120
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000121- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
122 {remove_history,replace_history}
123
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000124- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
125 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000126
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000127- stat_float_times is now True.
128
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000129- array.array objects are now picklable.
130
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000131- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
132 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
133
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000134- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
135 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
136 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
137
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000138- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
139 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000140
141Library
142-------
143
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000144- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
145 component of the path.
146
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000147- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
148 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
149 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
150 class at all.
151
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000152- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
153 files to PyPI.
154
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000155- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
156 them to PyPI.
157
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000158- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
159 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
160 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
161 work as expected.
162
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000163- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
164 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
165
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000166- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
167 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
168
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000169- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
170
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000171- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
172 to build.
173
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000174- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
175 symbolic links on Windows.
176
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000177- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
178 profile.py if available.
179
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000180- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
181
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000182- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
183 in LWPCookieJar.
184
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000185- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
186
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000187- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
188
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000189- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
190
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000191- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
192
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000193- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
194
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000195- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
196
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000197- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
198
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000199- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
200
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000201- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
202 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
203 be exploited in various ways.
204
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000205- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
206
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000207- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
208
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000209- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
210
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000211- Enhancements to the csv module:
212
213 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
214 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
215 PEP 305.
216 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
217 reporting.
218 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
219 dictates.
220 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000221 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000222 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000223 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
224 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000225 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
226 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000227 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000228 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
229 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
230 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
231 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
232 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
233 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
234 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
235 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
236 without first creating a dialect class.
237 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
238 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
239 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000240 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000241 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
242 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000243 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
244 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
245 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
246 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000247 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
248 This has been fixed.
249
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000250- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
251 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
252 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
253 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
254
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000255- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
256
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000257- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
258 (Bug #951915).
259
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000260- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
261 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
262 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
263 encoding alias table
264
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000265- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
266
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000267- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
268 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
269
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000270- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
271
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000272- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
273
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000274- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
275
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000276- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
277
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000278- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
279
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000280- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
281 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
282 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
283
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000284- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000285 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000286
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000287- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
288 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
289 tokenizer with very long source lines.
290
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000291- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
292 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
293
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000294- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
295 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000296
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000297- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
298 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
299
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000300- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
301 correctly.
302
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000303- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
304 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
305 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
306 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
307 between two lines.
308
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000309
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000310Build
311-----
312
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000313- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
314 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
315 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000316 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000317
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000318- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
319 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
320 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
321
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000322- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
323
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000324- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
325 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
326
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000327- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
328 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
329 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
330 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
331 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
332 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
333 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
334 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
335
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000336- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
337 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
338 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
339 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
340
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000341
342C API
343-----
344
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000345- Removed PyRange_New().
346
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000347
348Tests
349-----
350
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000351- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000352
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000353
354Documentation
355-------------
356
357- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
358 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
359 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
360
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000361Mac
362---
363
364
365
366Tools/Demos
367-----------
368
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000369- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000370
371
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000372What's New in Python 2.4 final?
373===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000374
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000375*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000376
377Core and builtins
378-----------------
379
380- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
381 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
382 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
383
384
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000385What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
386==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000387
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000388*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000389
390Core and builtins
391-----------------
392
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000393- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
394 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
395 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
396
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000397
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000398Library
399-------
400
401- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
402 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
403 raised is re-raised.
404
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000405- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
406 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
407
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000408- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
409 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
410 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
411 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
412 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
413 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
414 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
415 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
416 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
417 by the slice are recomputed now.
418
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000419- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000420
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000421Build
422-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000423
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000424- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
425 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
426 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000427
428C API
429-----
430
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000431- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
432
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000433
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000434What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
435================================
436
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000437*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000438
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000439License
440-------
441
442The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
443is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
444changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
445Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
446intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
447durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
448the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
449License::
450
451 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
452
453says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
454to Python 2.1.1.
455
456The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
457License Version 2.
458
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000459Core and builtins
460-----------------
461
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000462- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
463 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
464 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
465 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
466 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
467 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
468 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
469 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
470 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
471 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
472
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000473- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000474
475Extension Modules
476-----------------
477
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000478- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
479 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
480 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
481 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000482
483Library
484-------
485
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000486- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
487 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
488 returned.
489
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000490- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
491
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000492- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
493 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
494
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000495- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
496
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000497- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
498 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000499
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000500- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
501
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000502- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
503
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000504- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000505 the source code is updated and reloaded.
506
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000507Build
508-----
509
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000510- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000511
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000512What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
513================================
514
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000515*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000516
517Core and builtins
518-----------------
519
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000520- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000521 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
522
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000523- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
524 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
525 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
526 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
527
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000528- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
529 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
530
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000531- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
532 constant.
533
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000534- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
535 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
536 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
537 large), and to anomalies such as
538 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
539 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
540 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
541 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000542
543Extension modules
544-----------------
545
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000546- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
547 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000548 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
549 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
550 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000551
552Library
553-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000554
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000555- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000556 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000557 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
558 --swig-cpp.
559
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000560- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
561 it is set.
562
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000563- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000564
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000565- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
566 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
567 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
568 Closes bug #1039270.
569
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000570- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000571
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000572 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000573 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
574 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
575 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
576 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
577 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
578 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
579 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
580 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
581 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
582 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
583 + Updates to documentation.
584
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000585- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
586 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
587 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
588 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
589
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000590- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000591
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000592- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
593 applications should use the getmember function.
594
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000595- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
596
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000597- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
598 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
599 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
600 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
601 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
602 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
603 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
604 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
605 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
606
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000607- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
608 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000609 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000610
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000611- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
612 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
613 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
614 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
615 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
616 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
617 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
618 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000619
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000620- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
621 the new public features (of which there are many).
622
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000623- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000624 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
625 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
626 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
627 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000628 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000629
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000630- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
631
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000632- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
633 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
634 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
635 options.
636
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000637- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
638 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
639 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
640 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
641 conditions under which non-string values work.
642
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000643Build
644-----
645
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000646- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
647 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
648 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
649
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000650- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
651 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
652 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
653 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
654 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000655
656C API
657-----
658
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000659- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
660 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
661
662- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
663
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000664- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
665 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
666 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
667 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
668 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
669 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
670 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
671 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
672 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
673
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000674- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
675
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000676- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
677 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
678 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000679
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000680Tests
681-----
682
683- test__locale ported to unittest
684
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000685Mac
686---
687
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000688- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
689 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
690 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000691
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000692Tools/Demos
693-----------
694
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000695- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
696 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
697 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
698 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
699 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000700
701
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000702What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
703=================================
704
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000705*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000706
707Core and builtins
708-----------------
709
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000710- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000711 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
712
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000713- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
714 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
715 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
716 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
717 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
718 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
719 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
720 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000721 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
722 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
723 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
724 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
725 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000726
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000727- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
728 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
729 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
730 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
731 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
732
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000733- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
734
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000735- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
736 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
737
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000738- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
739 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
740 modified the list.
741
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000742- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
743 functions is now writable.
744
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000745- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
746 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
747 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
748 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
749
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000750- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
751 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
752 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
753 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
754 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000755
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000756- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
757 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
758
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000759Extension modules
760-----------------
761
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000762- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
763
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000764- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
765 data.
766
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000767- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
768 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
769 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
770 supposed to have been truncated away.
771
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000772- Added socket.socketpair().
773
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000774- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
775 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
776
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000777- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000778 versions of Python, have now been removed.
779
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000780Library
781-------
782
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000783- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000784 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000785
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000786- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
787 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
788
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000789- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
790 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
791
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000792- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
793
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000794- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
795 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000796
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000797- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
798 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
799
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000800- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
801
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000802- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
803
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000804- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
805
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000806- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
807 Percivall.
808
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000809- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
810 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
811
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000812- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
813 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
814 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000815 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000816
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000817- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
818 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
819 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
820 and exponent.
821
822- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
823
824- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
825 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
826 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
827
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000828- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
829 to the readline module.
830
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000831- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000832 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
833 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000834
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000835- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
836 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
837 contains symlinks.
838
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000839- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
840 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
841
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000842- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
843 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
844 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
845
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000846- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
847 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
848 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
849 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
850 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
851 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
852 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
853 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
854 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
855 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
856 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
857 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
858 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
859
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000860- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
861
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000862Tools/Demos
863-----------
864
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000865- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
866 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
867
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000868- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
869
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000870Build
871-----
872
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000873- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
874 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
875 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
876 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
877 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
878 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
879 plans to do so.
880
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000881- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
882 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
883
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000884- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
885 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
886
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000887- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
888 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
889
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000890- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
891 GNU/k*BSD systems.
892
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000893- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
894 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
895
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000896C API
897-----
898
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000899..
900
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000901Documentation
902-------------
903
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000904- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
905 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
906
907- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
908 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
909 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000910
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000911New platforms
912-------------
913
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000914- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
915
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000916Tests
917-----
918
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000919..
920
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000921Windows
922-------
923
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000924- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
925 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
926 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
927 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
928 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
929 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
930 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
931 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
932 the problem.
933
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000934Mac
935---
936
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000937..
938
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000939
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000940What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
941=================================
942
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000943*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000944
945Core and builtins
946-----------------
947
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000948- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
949 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
950 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
951 sensitive code.
952
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000953- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000954 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000955
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000956 @staticmethod
957 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000958
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000959 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000960
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000961- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
962 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
963 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
964 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
965 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
966 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
967 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
968 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
969 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
970 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
971 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
972
973 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
974 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
975 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
976 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
977 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
978 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
979 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
980
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000981- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
982 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
983
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000984- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000985 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000986
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000987- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000988 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000989 which was missing for no apparent reason.
990
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000991- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000992 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
993 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
994
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000995- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
996 types that support garbage collection.
997
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000998- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
999
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001000- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1001 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1002 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1003 Jython.
1004
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001005- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1006
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001007- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1008 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1009
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001010- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1011 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1012 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001013
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001014- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1015 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1016 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1017
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001018Extension modules
1019-----------------
1020
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001021- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1022
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001023Library
1024-------
1025
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001026- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1027 TIS-620
1028
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001029- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1030 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1031 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1032 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1033 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1034 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1035 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1036 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1037 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1038 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1039
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001040- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1041
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001042- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1043 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1044 same as when the argument is omitted).
1045 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1046
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001047- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1048
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001049- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1050 schemes are offered.
1051
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001052- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1053
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001054- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1055 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1056 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1057
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001058- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1059
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001060- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1061 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1062
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001063- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1064 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1065 when dummy_threading is being used.
1066
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001067- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1068 from a tarfile.
1069
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001070- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001071 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001072
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001073- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1074 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1075 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1076 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1077
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001078- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1079 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1080
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001081- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1082 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1083 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1084 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1085 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1086 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1087 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1088 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1089 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1090 by some other method in progress).
1091
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001092- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1093 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1094 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001095
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001096- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1097
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001098- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1099 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1100 AM Kuchling.
1101
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001102- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1103 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1104 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1105
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001106- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1107 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1108 instead of unsigned.
1109
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001110- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001111 no longer part of the public API.
1112
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001113- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1114 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1115 string methods of the same name).
1116
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001117- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001118 SF patch 945642.
1119
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001120- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1121
1122 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1123
1124 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1125 DocTestSuites.
1126
1127- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1128 that provide thread-local data.
1129
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001130- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1131 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1132
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001133- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1134
1135- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1136 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1137 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1138
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001139- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1140
1141 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1142 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1143 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001144
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001145 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1146 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1147 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1148 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1149
1150 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1151 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1152
1153 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1154 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1155 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1156 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1157
1158 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1159 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1160 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1161 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1162 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1163
1164 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1165 wrapping help output.
1166
1167 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1168 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1169 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001170
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001171C API
1172-----
1173
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001174- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1175 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1176 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1177 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1178 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1179 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1180 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1181 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1182 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1183 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1184 its visible semantics have not changed.
1185
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001186- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1187 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1188
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001189Documentation
1190-------------
1191
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001192- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001193
1194 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001195 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001196
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001197 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001198
1199 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1200
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001201- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001202
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001203Tests
1204-----
1205
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001206- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001207 platforms that use the Makefile.
1208
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001209- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1210 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1211 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1212
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001213
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001214What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1215=================================
1216
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001217*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001218
1219Core and builtins
1220-----------------
1221
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001222- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1223 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1224 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1225 objects now (one object instead of three).
1226
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001227- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1228 Windows DLLs.
1229
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001230- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1231 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001232
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001233- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1234 a new .pyc magic.
1235
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001236- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1237 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1238 be there.
1239
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001240- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1241 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1242 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1243
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001244- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1245 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1246 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1247
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001248- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1249
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001250- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1251 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1252 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001253
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001254- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1255 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1256
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001257- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1258
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001259- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001260 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001261
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001262- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1263
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001264- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1265
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001266- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1267 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1268
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001269- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1270 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1271 Fixes bug #858016 .
1272
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001273- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1274 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1275 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1276
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001277- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1278 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1279 improves their performance (about 35%).
1280
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001281- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1282 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1283 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1284
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001285- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1286 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1287 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1288 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1289
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001290- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1291 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001292 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001293 length is not known).
1294
1295- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1296 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001297 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1298 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001299 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1300
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001301- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1302 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1303
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001304- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1305 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1306 keyword arguments.
1307
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001308- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1309 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1310 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1311
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001312- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1313 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1314 cases.
1315
1316- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1317 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1318 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1319 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1320 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1321 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1322 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1323 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1324 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1325 a release build.
1326
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001327- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1328 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1329
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001330- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001331 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001332
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001333- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1334 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1335 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1336 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1337 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1338 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1339 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1340 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1341 destroyed.
1342
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001343- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1344 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1345 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1346 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1347 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1348 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1349 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1350 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1351
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001352- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1353 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1354 character other than a space.
1355
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001356- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1357 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1358 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1359 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1360 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1361 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1362 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1363 attributes with the same name.
1364
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001365- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1366 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1367 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1368 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1369 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1370 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1371 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1372 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1373 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1374 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1375 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1376 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1377 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1378 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001379
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001380- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1381 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1382 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1383 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1384 This has been repaired.
1385
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001386- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1387
1388- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1389
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001390- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1391 over a sequence.
1392
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001393- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001394 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001395
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001396- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1397
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001398- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1399 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1400 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1401 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1402 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1403 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1404 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1405 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1406
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001407- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1408 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1409 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1410
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001411- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1412 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1413 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1414 freelist.
1415
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001416- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1417 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1418
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001419- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1420 number.
1421
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001422- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1423 a TypeError exception.
1424
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001425- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1426 820195.
1427
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001428- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1429 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1430 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1431
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001432- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001433 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1434 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001435
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001436- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1437 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1438 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1439
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001440- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1441 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001442 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001443
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001444- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001445 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1446 the first call.
1447
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001448
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001449Extension modules
1450-----------------
1451
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001452- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1453 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1454
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001455- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1456 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1457 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1458 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1459 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1460 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1461 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001462
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001463- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1464
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001465- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1466
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001467- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1468 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1469
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001470- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1471 fewer false positives.
1472
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001473- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1474 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1475
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001476- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001477 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1478
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001479- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001480 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001481 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001482 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1483 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001484
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001485- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1486 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1487 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1488 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1489
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001490- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1491 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1492 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1493 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1494 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1495 #897625.
1496
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001497- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1498 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1499
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001500- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1501 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1502 and pops on either side of the deque.
1503
1504- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1505 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1506
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001507- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1508 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1509 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1510 other functions that expect a function argument.
1511
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001512- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1513
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001514- os.getsid was added.
1515
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001516- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1517 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1518 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1519
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001520- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1521
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001522- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1523
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001524- readline.clear_history was added.
1525
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001526- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1527
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001528- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1529
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001530- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1531
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001532- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1533
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001534- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1535
1536- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1537
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001538- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1539
1540- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1541
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001542- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1543 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1544 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1545
1546- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1547 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1548 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1549 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1550 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1551 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1552 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1553
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001554- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1555 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1556 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1557 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001558
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001559- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001560 iterators from a single iterable.
1561
1562- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1563 of raising a TypeError exception.
1564
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001565- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1566 as parameter.
1567
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001568Library
1569-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001570
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001571- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1572 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1573 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001574
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001575- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1576 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1577 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001578
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001579- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001580
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001581- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1582 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001583
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001584- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1585 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1586
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001587- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1588
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001589- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001590 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001591
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001592- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001593 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001594
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001595- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1596
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001597- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1598 on cygwin and mingw32.
1599
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001600- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1601
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001602- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1603 module.
1604
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001605- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1606 installation scheme for all platforms.
1607
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001608- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001609 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001610
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001611- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1612 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1613 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1614
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001615- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1616 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1617 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1618
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001619- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1620
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001621- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1622
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001623- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1624 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1625
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001626- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1627 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1628 type pattern with the same value exists.
1629
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001630- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1631 when run from the command prompt).
1632
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001633- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1634 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1635
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001636- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1637 default sort).
1638
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001639- Added global runctx function to profile module
1640
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001641- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1642
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001643- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1644
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001645- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1646
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001647- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001648 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1649 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1650 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1651 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1652 accordingly.
1653
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001654- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1655 decoding standards.
1656
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001657- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1658 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1659 called for all requests.
1660
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001661- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1662 they are passed to the compiler.
1663
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001664- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1665 indent, width and depth.
1666
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001667- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1668 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1669
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001670- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1671 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1672
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001673- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1674
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001675- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1676
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001677- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1678
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001679- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1680 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1681
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001682- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001683 for better performance.
1684
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001685- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001686
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001687- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1688 a string).
1689
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001690- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1691
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001692- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1693
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001694- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1695
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001696- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1697
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001698- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1699 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1700 list of fieldnames.
1701
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001702- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1703 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1704
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001705- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1706
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001707- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1708 empty lists.
1709
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001710- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1711 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1712 and shelves.
1713
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001714- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1715 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1716
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001717- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001718 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1719 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001720
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001721- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1722 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001723 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001724
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001725- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001726 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1727 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1728
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001729- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1730 and removed in Py2.4.
1731
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001732- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1733
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001734- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1735
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001736Tools/Demos
1737-----------
1738
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001739- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1740 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1741
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001742- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1743
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001744- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1745 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1746 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1747 destination in situations where both files are given.
1748
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001749- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1750 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1751 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1752 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1753
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001754- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1755
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001756- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1757 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1758 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1759 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1760 now.
1761
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001762- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1763 in effect
1764
1765- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1766 C-c C-h
1767
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001768- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1769 -d option was given.
1770
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001771Build
1772-----
1773
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001774- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1775 build under OS X.
1776
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001777- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1778 --enable-profiling.
1779
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001780- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1781 is configured --with-tsc.
1782
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001783- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1784 on AMD64.
1785
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001786- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1787 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1788
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001789- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1790 removed.
1791
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001792- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1793 supported (see PEP 11).
1794
1795- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1796
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001797- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1798
1799- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1800 (see PEP 11).
1801
1802- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1803 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1804
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001805C API
1806-----
1807
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001808- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1809 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1810 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1811
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001812- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1813 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1814 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1815 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1816
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001817- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1818 generator objects.
1819
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001820- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1821 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001822 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1823 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001824
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001825- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1826 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1827
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001828- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1829 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1830 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1831 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1832 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1833
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001834- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1835 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1836 about 10% faster.
1837
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001838- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1839 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1840
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001841- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1842 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1843 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1844 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1845
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001846Windows
1847-------
1848
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001849- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1850 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1851 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1852 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1853
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001854- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1855 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1856 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1857
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001858
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001859What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1860===============================
1861
1862*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1863
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001864IDLE
1865----
1866
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001867- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1868 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1869 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1870 context-menu actions.
1871
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001872- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1873 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1874 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1875 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1876 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1877 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1878 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1879 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1880 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1881
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001882
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001883What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1884=============================================
1885
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001886*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001887
1888Core and builtins
1889-----------------
1890
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001891- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001892 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001893 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1894
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001895Extension modules
1896-----------------
1897
1898- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1899 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1900 than once. This has been fixed.
1901
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001902- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1903 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1904 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1905 call.
1906
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001907- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1908
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001909Library
1910-------
1911
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001912- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1913 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1914
1915- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1916 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1917 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1918 restored.
1919
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001920IDLE
1921----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001922
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001923- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001924
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001925Build
1926-----
1927
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001928- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1929 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1930
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001931C API
1932-----
1933
1934Windows
1935-------
1936
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001937- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1938 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1939
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001940- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1941
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001942Mac
1943---
1944
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001945- Various fixes to pimp.
1946
1947- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1948
1949- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1950 more problems than it solves.
1951
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001952
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001953What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1954=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001955
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001956*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1957
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001958Core and builtins
1959-----------------
1960
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001961- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1962 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1963
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001964- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1965 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001966 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001967
1968- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1969 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1970 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001971 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001972
1973- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1974 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001975
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001976- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1977 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1978 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1979
1980- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001981 770247.
1982
1983- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001984
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001985Extension modules
1986-----------------
1987
1988- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1989 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1990
1991- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1992
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001993- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1994
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001995- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1996 contained within the _strptime module.
1997
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001998- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1999 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2000
2001- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002002 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2003
2004- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2005 the find_class attribute, if present.
2006
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002007- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002008
2009 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2010 (SF bug 763298).
2011
2012 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002013 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2014 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2015 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002016
2017 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2018
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002019Library
2020-------
2021
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002022- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2023
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002024- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2025 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2026 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2027 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2028 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2029 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2030 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2031 or Tester().
2032
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002033- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2034 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2035 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2036 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2037 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2038 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2039 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2040 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2041 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002042
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002043 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002044
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002045- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2046 weren't before was an oversight.
2047
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002048- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2049 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2050
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002051- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2052 when there are no lines.
2053
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002054- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2055 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2056
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002057- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2058 to child processes.
2059
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002060- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2061
2062- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2063
2064- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2065 xmlrpclib.
2066
2067- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2068 responses.
2069
2070- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2071 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2072
2073- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2074 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2075 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2076
2077- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2078 used as patterns.
2079
2080- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2081 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2082 than Tk 8.3.
2083
2084- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2085
2086- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002087
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002088Tools/Demos
2089-----------
2090
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002091- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2092
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002093- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2094
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002095- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002096
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002097Build
2098-----
2099
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002100- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2101
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002102- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2103
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002104- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2105 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002106
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002107- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2108 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2109 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002110
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002111C API
2112-----
2113
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002114- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2115 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2116
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002117Windows
2118-------
2119
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002120- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2121 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2122 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2123 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2124 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2125 Python exception ::
2126
2127 thread.error: can't start new thread
2128
2129 is raised now.
2130
2131- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2132 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2133 instead of from DLL teardown.
2134
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002135Mac
2136---
2137
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002138- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002139 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002140 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2141 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2142 the executable in the bundle.
2143
2144- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002145
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002146- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2147
2148- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2149 on Panther.
2150
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002151What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2152================================
2153
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002154*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002155
2156Core and builtins
2157-----------------
2158
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002159- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2160 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2161 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2162 with the -i option.
2163
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002164- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2165 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2166
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002167- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2168 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2169
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002170- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2171 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2172 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2173 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2174 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2175 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2176 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2177 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2178 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2179 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2180 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2181 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2182 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002183
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002184- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2185 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2186 embedded in a lambda expression.
2187
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002188- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2189 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2190 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2191 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2192 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2193
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002194- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2195 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2196 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2197
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002198- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2199 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2200
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002201- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2202 It's writable again.
2203
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002204- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2205 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2206 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002207 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002208
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002209- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2210 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2211 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2212
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002213Extension modules
2214-----------------
2215
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002216- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2217 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2218
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002219- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2220 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2221 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2222 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2223
2224- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2225 collection.
2226
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002227- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2228 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2229 unique within a single program run.
2230
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002231- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2232 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2233
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002234- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2235 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2236
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002237- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2238 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002239
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002240- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2241
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002242- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2243 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2244
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002245- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2246 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2247 for many BSD-derived systems.
2248
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002249
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002250Library
2251-------
2252
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002253- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2254 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2255 primary ones:
2256
2257 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2258 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2259 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2260
2261 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2262 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2263 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2264 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2265 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2266 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2267
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002268- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2269 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2270 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2271 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2272 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2273 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2274 argument.
2275
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002276- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2277 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2278 in the archive.
2279
2280- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2281 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2282
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002283- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2284 569574).
2285
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002286- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2287 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2288 no more.
2289
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002290- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2291 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2292 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2293 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2294 code coverage.
2295
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002296- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2297 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2298 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002299 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2300 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002301
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002302- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2303 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2304 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002305 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002306
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002307- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2308
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002309- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2310 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2311 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2312 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2313
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002314- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2315 handling.
2316
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002317- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2318 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2319
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002320- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2321 in socket.py.
2322
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002323- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2324
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002325- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2326 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2327 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2328 opener with proxy support.
2329
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002330- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2331
2332- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2333
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002334Tools/Demos
2335-----------
2336
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002337- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2338
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002339- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2340
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002341- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2342 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002343
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002344- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2345 files.
2346
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002347Build
2348-----
2349
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002350- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002351 different root directory.
2352
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002353C API
2354-----
2355
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002356- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2357 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2358 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2359 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2360 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2361 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2362 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2363 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2364 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2365 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2366
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002367- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2368 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2369 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2370 from Python.
2371
2372
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002373New platforms
2374-------------
2375
2376None this time.
2377
2378Tests
2379-----
2380
2381- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2382 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2383
2384Windows
2385-------
2386
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002387- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2388
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002389- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2390 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2391 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2392 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2393 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2394 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2395 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2396 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2397 that's what it's for.
2398
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002399Mac
2400---
2401
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002402- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2403 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2404 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2405 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002406- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2407 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2408- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002409
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002410SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2411------------------------------------
2412
2413430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2414598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2415622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2416661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2417683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2418697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2419713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2420724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2421727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2422729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2423730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2424731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2425732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2426733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2427735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2428740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2429744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2430745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2431747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2432749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2433751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2434753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2435755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2436757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2437760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2438
2439
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002440What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2441================================
2442
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002443*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002444
2445Core and builtins
2446-----------------
2447
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002448- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2449 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2450
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002451- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2452 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2453 and cannot be strings).
2454
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002455- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2456 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2457 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2458 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2459
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002460- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2461 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2462 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2463 Python itself.
2464
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002465- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2466 the referenced object, if it has one.
2467
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002468- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2469 the thread started at
2470 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2471
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002472- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2473 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2474 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2475 placed on a list index.
2476
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002477- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2478 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2479 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2480 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2481
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002482- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2483 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2484 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2485 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2486 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2487 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2488 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2489
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002490- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2491 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2492 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2493 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2494 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2495
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002496- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2497 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002498
2499- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2500 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2501 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2502 #693195.)
2503
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002504- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2505 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002506
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002507- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002508 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002509 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2510 interpreter executions, would fail.
2511
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002512- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002513 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002514 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002515
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002516Extension modules
2517-----------------
2518
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002519- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2520 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2521 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2522 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2523
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002524- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2525 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2526
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002527- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2528 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2529 and Greg Chapman.)
2530
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002531- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2532 recursively.
2533
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002534- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002535 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2536 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2537 leaks.
2538
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002539- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2540
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002541- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2542 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2543 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2544 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2545 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2546 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2547 #705836.
2548
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002549- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002550 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2551
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002552- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2553 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2554 See SF bug #692416.
2555
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002556- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2557 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2558
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002559- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2560 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2561 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002562
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002563- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002564 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2565 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2566
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002567- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2568 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2569 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2570 timeouts to work properly.
2571
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002572Library
2573-------
2574
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002575- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2576 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2577 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2578 future release.
2579
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002580- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2581 for querying platform dependent features.
2582
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002583- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002584
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002585- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2586 pickle protocol versions.
2587
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002588- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2589 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2590 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2591
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002592- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2593
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002594- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2595 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2596 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2597 modules.
2598
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002599- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2600 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2601 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2602
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002603- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2604 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2605
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002606- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2607 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2608 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2609
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002610- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002611 MS Office extensions.
2612
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002613- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2614 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2615
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002616- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2617 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2618
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002619- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2620 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2621 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2622 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2623 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2624 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2625
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002626- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2627 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2628 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002629
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002630- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2631 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2632 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2633
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002634- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2635
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002636- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2637 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2638 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2639
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002640Tools/Demos
2641-----------
2642
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002643- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2644 See the module docstring for details.
2645
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002646Build
2647-----
2648
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002649- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2650 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002651
2652C API
2653-----
2654
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002655- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2656
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002657- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2658 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2659 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2660
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002661- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2662 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002663
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002664 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2665 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2666 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002667
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002668- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002669 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2670
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002671- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2672 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2673 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002674
2675New platforms
2676-------------
2677
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002678None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002679
2680Tests
2681-----
2682
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002683- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2684 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002685
2686Windows
2687-------
2688
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002689- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2690 function.
2691
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002692- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2693 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002694
2695Mac
2696---
2697
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002698- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2699 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002700
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002701- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2702 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002703
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002704- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2705 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2706 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002707
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002708- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002709 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2710 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002711
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002712- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2713 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002714
2715
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002716What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2717=================================
2718
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002719*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002720
2721Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002722-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002723
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002724- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2725 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2726 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2727
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002728- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2729 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2730 (SF patch #664376.)
2731
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002732- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2733 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2734 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2735 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2736 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2737 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002738 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002739
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002740- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2741 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2742 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2743 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002744 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002745
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002746- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2747 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2748 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2749 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2750 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2751 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2752 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2753 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2754 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2755 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2756 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2757
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002758- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2759 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2760 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2761 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2762 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2763 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2764
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002765- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2766 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2767
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002768- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2769 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2770 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2771 case.)
2772
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002773- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2774 passed as unicode strings.
2775
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002776- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2777 See SF bug #683467.
2778
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002779- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2780 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2781
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002782- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2783
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002784- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2785
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002786- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2787 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2788 arguments.
2789
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002790- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2791 See SF bug #667147.
2792
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002793- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002794 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002795 See SF bug #676155.
2796
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002797- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002798 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002799 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2800 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2801 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2802 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2803 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2804 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002805
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002806Extension modules
2807-----------------
2808
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002809- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2810 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2811 tp_as_number pointer.
2812
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002813- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2814 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2815 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2816 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2817 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2818
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002819- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2820
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002821- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2822
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002823- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002824 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002825 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2826 patch #678531.)
2827
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002828- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2829 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2830
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002831- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2832 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2833
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002834- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2835
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002836- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2837 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2838 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2839
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002840- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2841
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002842- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2843 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2844
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002845- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002846
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002847- datetime changes:
2848
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002849 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2850
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002851 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2852 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2853 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2854 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2855 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2856 now.
2857
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002858 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002859 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2860 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002861
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002862 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002863 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002864 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2865 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2866 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2867 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002868
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002869 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2870 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2871 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002872 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2873
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002874 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2875 by a later example coded by Guido.
2876
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002877 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002878 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2879 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2880 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002881 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2882 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2883
2884 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2885 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2886 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2887 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2888 tzinfo subclass instance.
2889
2890 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2891 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2892 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2893 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2894 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2895 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2896 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2897 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002898
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002899 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2900 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2901 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2902 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2903 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002904 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2905
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002906 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002907
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002908 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2909 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2910 as a naive datetime object.
2911
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002912 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2913 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2914 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2915
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002916 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2917 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2918 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2919 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2920 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2921 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2922 comparison.
2923
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002924 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2925 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2926 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2927 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002928 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002929
2930 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002931
2932 and ::
2933
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002934 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2935
2936 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2937 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2938 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2939 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2940
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002941 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2942 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2943 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2944 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2945 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2946
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002947 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2948 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002949 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2950 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002951
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002952Library
2953-------
2954
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002955- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2956 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2957
2958- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2959 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2960 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2961 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2962 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2963 See PEP 307 for details.
2964
2965- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2966 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2967
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002968- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2969 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002970 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002971 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2972 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002973 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002974
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002975- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2976 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2977
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002978- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2979 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2980 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2981
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002982- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2983
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002984- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2985 exception.
2986
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002987- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2988 class.
2989
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002990- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2991 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2992 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2993
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002994- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2995 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2996
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002997- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002998 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2999 See SF bug #659228.
3000
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003001- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3002 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3003 See SF patch #651082.
3004
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003005- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003006
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003007- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3008 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3009
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003010- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003011 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003012
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003013- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3014 DOS paths from other platforms.
3015
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003016Tools/Demos
3017-----------
3018
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003019- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3020 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3021 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3022 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3023 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3024 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3025 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3026 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3027 example:
3028
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003029 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3030 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003031
3032 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3033
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003034
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003035Build
3036-----
3037
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003038- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3039 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3040 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003041 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3042
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003043 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3044
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003045- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3046 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3047 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3048 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3049 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3050 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3051 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3052 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3053 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3054
3055- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3056 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3057 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3058 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3059
3060- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3061 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3062
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003063C API
3064-----
3065
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003066- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3067 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003068
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003069- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3070 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3071 tp_as_number pointer.
3072
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003073- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3074 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3075 (SF #681367)
3076
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003077- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3078 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3079 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3080 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003081
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003082Tests
3083-----
3084
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003085- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003086 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3087 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3088 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3089 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3090 pydoc.)
3091
3092- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3093
3094- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003095
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003096Windows
3097-------
3098
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003099- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3100 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3101 time).
3102
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003103- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3104 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3105
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003106- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3107 release without strong cryptography.
3108
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003109- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003110 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003111
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003112- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3113 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3114
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003115Mac
3116---
3117
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003118- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3119 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003120
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003121- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3122 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3123 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003124
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003125- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3126 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003127
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003128- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3129 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3130 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3131 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003132
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003133- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003134 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3135 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3136 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003137
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003138
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003139What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003140=================================
3141
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003142*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003143
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003144Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003145--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003146
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003147- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3148
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003149- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3150 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003151 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003152 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003153 a different meaning than before.
3154
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003155- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003156 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003157 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003158
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003159- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003160 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003161 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003162
3163- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3164 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3165 and deallocation.
3166
3167- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3168 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3169
3170- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3171 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3172 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3173 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3174 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3175
3176- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3177 now detected by the garbage collector.
3178
3179- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3180 [SF bug 519621]
3181
3182- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3183 identifier.
3184
3185- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3186 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3187 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3188 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3189 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3190 [SF bug 563060]
3191
3192- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3193 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3194 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3195 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3196 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3197
3198- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3199 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3200 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3201
3202- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3203
3204- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3205 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3206 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3207 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3208 state of the slots would be lost.)
3209
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003210Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003211-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003212
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003213- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003214 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3215 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3216 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3217 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003218 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3219 Jython 2.1.
3220
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003221- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003222 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003223 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3224 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3225 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3226 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3227 these, see PEP 302.
3228
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003229- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3230 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3231 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3232
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003233- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3234 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3235 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3236
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003237- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3238 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3239 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3240
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003241- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3242 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3243 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3244 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3245 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3246 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3247 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3248 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3249 releases or implementations.
3250
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003251- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003252 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3253 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003254
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003255- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3256 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3257
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003258- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3259 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3260 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3261
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003262- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3263 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3264
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003265- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3266 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003267 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3268 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003269
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003270- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3271 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3272 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3273 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3274 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3275
3276 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3277 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3278 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3279 pattern.
3280
3281 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3282 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3283 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3284 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3285
3286 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3287 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3288 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3289 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3290 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3291 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3292
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003293- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3294 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3295 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3296 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3297 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3298 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3299 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3300 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003301
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003302- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3303 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3304 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3305 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3306 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003307 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3308 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3309 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3310 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3311 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3312 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3313 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003314
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003315- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3316 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3317
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003318- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3319 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3320 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3321 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3322 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3323 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3324 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3325 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3326 to Zack Weinberg!
3327
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003328- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3329 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3330 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3331 type. This has been fixed now.
3332
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003333- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3334 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3335 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3336
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003337- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3338 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3339 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3340 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3341 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3342 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3343 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3344 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003345 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003346
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003347- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3348 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3349 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003350
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003351- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3352 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3353 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3354 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3355 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3356 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3357 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3358 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003359 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003360 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3361 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3362
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003363- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3364 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3365 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3366 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3367 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3368 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3369 this.)
3370
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003371- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3372 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003373 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003374 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003375 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3376 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003377 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3378 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003379
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003380- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3381 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3382 currently running.
3383
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003384- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3385 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3386 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3387 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3388
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003389- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3390 as directory names.
3391
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003392- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3393 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3394
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003395- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3396 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3397
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003398- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003399 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3400 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003401
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003402- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3403 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3404 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3405 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3406 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3407
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003408- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3409 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3410 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3411 removed.
3412
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003413- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3414 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3415 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3416
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003417- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3418 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3419 to __debug__.
3420
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003421- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3422 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3423 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3424
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003425- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3426 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3427 deprecated now.
3428
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003429- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3430 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3431 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003432
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003433- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3434 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3435 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3436 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3437 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003438
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003439- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3440 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3441
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003442- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3443 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3444 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003445 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003446 is backward compatible.
3447
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003448- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3449 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3450 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3451 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3452 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3453
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003454- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3455 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3456 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3457 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3458 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3459 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003460
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003461- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3462 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3463
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003464- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3465 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3466
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003467- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3468 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3469 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3470 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3471 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3472
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003473- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3474 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3475 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3476
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003477- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003478 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3479
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003480- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3481 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3482 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003483
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003484- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3485 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3486
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003487- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3488 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3489 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3490
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003491- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3492
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003493Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003494-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003495
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003496- Added three operators to the operator module:
3497 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3498 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3499 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3500
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003501- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3502
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003503- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3504 archives.
3505
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003506- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3507 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3508 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3509
3510 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3511
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003512- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3513 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3514 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003515 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003516
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003517- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3518 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3519 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3520 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003521 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3522 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3523 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3524 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003525
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003526- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3527 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003528
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003529- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3530
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003531- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3532 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3533
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003534- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3535 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3536 supported.
3537
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003538- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3539
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003540- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3541 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003542
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003543- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3544 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3545
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003546- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3547
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003548- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3549 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3550
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003551- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3552 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3553 functions but callable type objects.
3554
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003555- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003556 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003557 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003558
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003559- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3560 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003561
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003562- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3563 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003564
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003565- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3566 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3567 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3568 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3569
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003570- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3571 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003572
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003573- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3574 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3575 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3576 and __imul__.
3577
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003578- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003579 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3580 is called.
3581
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003582- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3583 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3584 interpreter was compiled.
3585
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003586- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3587 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3588 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003589 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003590 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3591 1, not 2.
3592
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003593- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3594 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3595 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3596 limit.
3597
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003598- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3599 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3600 bug #623464.
3601
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003602- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3603 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3604 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3605 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3606
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003607Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003608-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003609
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003610- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3611
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003612- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3613 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3614 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3615 with Python 2.3a2.
3616
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003617- os.path exposes getctime.
3618
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003619- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003620 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003621 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003622 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003623 unit tests of floating point results.
3624
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003625- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3626 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3627 has been increased.
3628
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003629- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3630 executed.
3631
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003632- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3633 postinstallation script.
3634
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003635- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3636 test the current module.
3637
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003638- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003639 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3640 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3641 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3642 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3643
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003644- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003645 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003646 Ward's Optik package.
3647
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003648- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3649 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3650 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3651 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3652
3653- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3654 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003655 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003656
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003657- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3658 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3659 shelf are binary pickles.
3660
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003661- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3662 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3663
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003664- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3665 modules are iterators now.
3666
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003667- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3668 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3669 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3670 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3671 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3672 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003673
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003674- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3675 with their entity value.
3676
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003677- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3678
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003679- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3680 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003681
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003682- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3683 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003684 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003685
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003686- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3687 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3688 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3689 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3690 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3691 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3692 main():
3693
3694 import locale
3695 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3696
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003697- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3698 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3699
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003700- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3701 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3702 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3703 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3704 to the new standard.
3705
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003706- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3707 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3708 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3709 an extension to the database.
3710
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003711- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3712 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3713 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3714 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003715 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003716
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003717- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003718 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003719
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003720- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3721 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3722 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3723 bounded integers.
3724
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003725- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3726 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3727 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3728 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3729 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3730 in existence.
3731
3732 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3733 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3734 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3735 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3736 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3737 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3738
3739 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3740 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3741 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3742 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3743
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003744- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3745 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3746 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3747
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003748- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3749
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003750- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3751 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3752 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3753 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3754
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003755- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3756 argument.
3757
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003758- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3759 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3760 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3761 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3762 [SF patch 560794].
3763
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003764- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3765 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3766 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003767 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3768 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3769 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003770
3771- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3772 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003773
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003774- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3775 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3776 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3777 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003778
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003779- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3780 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3781 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3782 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3783 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3784
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003785- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003786
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003787- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3788
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003789- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3790 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3791 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3792 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3793 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3794 identical to None.
3795
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003796- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3797 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3798 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3799 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3800 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3801 results now.
3802
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003803- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3804 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3805
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003806- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3807 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3808 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3809 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3810 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3811 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3812 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3813 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3814
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003815- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3816
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003817- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3818 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3819
3820- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3821 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3822 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3823 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3824 and other systems.
3825
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003826- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3827 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3828 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3829 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 +00003830 work well with these.
3831
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003832- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3833
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003834- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003835 connections.
3836
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003837- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3838 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3839 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3840
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003841- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3842 sets
3843
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003844- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3845 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3846 name.
3847
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003848- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3849 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3850 passed in.
3851
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003852- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003853 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003854 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3855 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003856
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003857- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3858
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003859- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3860
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003861- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3862 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3863 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3864
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003865- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3866 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3867 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3868 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003869 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003870
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003871- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003872 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003873 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003874
3875- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3876 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3877 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3878
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003879- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003880 the value of its expression argument.
3881
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003882- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3883 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3884 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3885
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003886- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3887 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3888 skipstone browser was included.
3889
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003890- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3891 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3892
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003893Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003894-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003895
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003896- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3897 names in addition to accepting file names.
3898
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003899- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3900 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3901 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3902 still used and useful.)
3903
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003904- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3905 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3906 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3907 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003908
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003909- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3910 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3911 the generated binary.
3912
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003913Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003914-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003915
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003916- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3917
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003918- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3919 except in the hands of experts.
3920
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003921- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003922 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3923 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3924 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003925
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003926- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3927 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3928 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3929 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3930 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3931 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3932 builds.
3933
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003934- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3935 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3936 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3937 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3938 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3939 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3940 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3941 new type.
3942
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003943- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003944
3945 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3946 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3947 positive infinities.
3948
3949 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3950 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3951 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3952 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3953 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3954 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3955 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3956
3957 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3958
3959 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3960
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003961- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3962 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3963 size of the executable.
3964
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003965- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3966 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3967 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3968 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003969
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003970- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3971
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003972- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3973 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3974 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003975
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003976- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3977 well as Unix.
3978
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003979- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3980 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3981 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3982 modules in the README file for details.
3983
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003984C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003985-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003986
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003987- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3988 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003989 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003990 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003991 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003992
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003993- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3994 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3995 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3996 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3997 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3998 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003999 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004000 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4001 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4002 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4003 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4004 aligned.)
4005
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004006- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4007 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4008 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4009
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004010- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4011 level.
4012
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004013- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4014 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4015 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4016 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4017 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4018
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004019- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4020 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4021 code.
4022
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004023- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4024 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4025 adjusting for negative indices.
4026
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004027- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4028 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4029 object.
4030
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004031- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4032 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4033 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4034
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004035- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4036 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004037
4038- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4039
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004040- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4041 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4042 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4043 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4044
4045- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4046
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004047- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004048
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004049- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004050 without going through the buffer API.
4051
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004052- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004053
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004054- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4055 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4056 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4057 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4058
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004059- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4060 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4061
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004062- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004063 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4064
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004065New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004066-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004067
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004068- OpenVMS is now supported.
4069
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004070- AtheOS is now supported.
4071
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004072- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4073
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004074- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4075
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004076Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004077-----
4078
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004079- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4080 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4081 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004082
4083Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004084-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004085
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004086- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4087 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4088 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4089 bugs.
4090 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004091 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004092 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4093 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004094 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004095
4096- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004097 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004098
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004099- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4100 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4101
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004102- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4103 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004104 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004105 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4106
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004107- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4108 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4109 use files" uninstall option).
4110
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004111- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4112
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004113- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4114 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4115
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004116- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4117 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4118 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4119
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004120- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4121 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4122 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4123 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4124 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004125 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4126 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4127 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004128
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004129- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004130 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004131 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4132 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4133 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4134 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4135 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4136 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4137 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4138 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4139 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4140 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4141 work around.
4142
4143- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4144 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4145 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4146 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4147 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4148 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4149 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4150 specified with O_CREAT too).
4151
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004152Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004153----
4154
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004155- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004156
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004157- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4158 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4159 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4160
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004161- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4162 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4163 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4164
4165- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4166 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4167 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4168 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4169 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4170 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4171 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4172 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004173
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004174- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4175 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4176 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004177
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004178- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4179 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4180 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4181 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4182 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004183
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004184- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4185 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4186 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004187
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004188- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4189 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004190
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004191- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4192 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4193 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4194 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4195 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004196
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004197- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4198 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4199 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4200
4201- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4202 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4203 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004204
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004205- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4206 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4207 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4208 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004209 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004210
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004211- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4212 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004213
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004214- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4215 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004216
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004217- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004218 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004219 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4220 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004221
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004222
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004223What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004224===============================
4225
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004226*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4227
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004228Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004229--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004230
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004231- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4232 with a custom metaclass.
4233
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004234Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004235-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004236
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004237- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4238 are proxies.
4239
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004240Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004241-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004242
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004243- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4244 very short strings.
4245
4246- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4247 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4248 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4249 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4250 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4251
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004252Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004253-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004254
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004255- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4256 close or delete time).
4257
4258- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4259 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4260
4261- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4262
4263- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004264 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004265
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004266Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004267-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004268
4269Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004270-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004271
4272C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004273-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004274
4275New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004276-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004277
4278Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004280
4281Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004282-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004283
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004284- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4285
4286- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4287 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4288
4289- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4290 deleted at process exit time.
4291
4292- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4293 in backslash.
4294
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004295Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004296----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004297
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004298- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4299 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4300 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4301
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004302
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004303What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004304===========================
4305
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4307
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004308Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004309--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004310
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004311- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4312 been extensively updated. See
4313
4314 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4315
4316 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4317
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004318- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4319 deleted!
4320
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004321- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4322 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4323 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4324 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4325 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4326
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004327- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4328
4329 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4330 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4331
4332 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4333 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4334 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4335 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4336 supported anyway.
4337
4338 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4339 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4340
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004341- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4342 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4343 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4344 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4345 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004346
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004347- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4348 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4349 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4350
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004351Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004352-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004353
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004354- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4355 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4356 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4357 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4358 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4359 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004360 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4361 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4362 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4363 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004364
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004365- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4366 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4367 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4368
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004369Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004370-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004371
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004372- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4373
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004374Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004375-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004376
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004377- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4378 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4379 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4380 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4381 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4382 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4383
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004384- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4385
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004386- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4387
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004388- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4389
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004390- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4391 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4392 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4393
4394- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4395
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004396Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004397-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004398
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004399- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4400 off a search on Google.
4401
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004402Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004403-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004404
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004405- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4406 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4407 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4408 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4409 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4410 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4411 other platforms should do likewise.
4412
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004413- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4414 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4415 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4416
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004417C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004418-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004419
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004420- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4421 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4422 producing key-value pairs.
4423
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004424- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004425 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004426 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4427 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4428 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4429 previously went unchallenged.
4430
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004431New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004432-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004433
4434Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004435-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004436
4437Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004438-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004439
4440Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004441----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004442
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004443- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4444 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004445
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004446- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4447 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4448 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4449 home.
4450
4451
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004452What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004453===========================
4454
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004455*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4456
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004457Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004458--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004459
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004460- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4461 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004462
4463 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004464 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004465
4466 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4467 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004468 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004469 This needs to be documented.
4470
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004471- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4472 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4473
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004474- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4475 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4476 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4477
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004478- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4479 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4480
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004481- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4482 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4483 class forbids it).
4484
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004485- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4486 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4487 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4488
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004489- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4490
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004491Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004492-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004493
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004494- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4495 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004496 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004497
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004498- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4499 (like 1 + '').
4500
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004501Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004502-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004503
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004504- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4505 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4506 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4507 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004508 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004509 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4510
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004511- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4512 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4513 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4514 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4515
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004516- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4517 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004518 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4519 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4520 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004521
4522- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4523 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004524
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004525- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4526 bytes on its input.
4527
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004528Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004529-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004530
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004531- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004532 convenience function.
4533
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004534- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4535 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4536 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004537 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4538 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4539 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4540 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4541 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4542 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004543
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004544- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4545 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4546 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4547 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4548
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004549- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4550 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4551 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4552
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004553- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4554 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4555 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4556 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4557
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004558- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4559 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004560 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004561 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4562 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4563 new -l and -e options.
4564
4565- statcache is now deprecated.
4566
4567- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4568 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004569 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004570 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4571 time properly taken into account.
4572
4573- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4574 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4575 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4576 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4577
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004578Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004579-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004580
4581Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004582-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004583
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004584- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4585 is built with libdb3 if available.
4586
4587- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4588
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004589C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004591
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004592- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4593 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4594 PySequence_Size().
4595
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004596- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4597
4598- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4599 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4600 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4601
4602- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4603 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4604
4605- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4606 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4607
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004608New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004609-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004610
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004611- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4612 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4613
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004614- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4615 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4616
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004617- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4618
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004619Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004620-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004621
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004622- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4623 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4624
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004625Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004626-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004627
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004628Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004629----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004630
4631- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4632 removed completely in the next release.
4633
4634- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4635 OSX.
4636
4637- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4638 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4639
4640- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4641
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004642
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004643What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004644===========================
4645
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004646*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4647
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004648Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004649--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004650
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004651- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004652 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004653 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004654 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4655 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004656 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4657 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004658 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4659 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004660
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004661- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4662 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4663
4664- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4665 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4666
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004667Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004668-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004669
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004670- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4671 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4672 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4673 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4674 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4675 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4676 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4677 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4678
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004679- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4680 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4681 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4682 example).
4683
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004684- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004685 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004686 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004687 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004688
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004689- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4690 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4691 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004692 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004693
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004694- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4695 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4696 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4697 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4698 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4699 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4700
4701 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4702
4703 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4704
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004705Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004706-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004707
4708- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4709
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004710- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4711
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004712- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4713 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004714
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004715- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4716 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4717 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4718 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4719 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4720 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004721 attributes.
4722
4723- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4724 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4725 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004726
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004727- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4728 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4729 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004730
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004731- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4732 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4733 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004734 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4735 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4736
4737- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4738 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004739
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004740Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004741-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004742
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004743- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4744 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4745
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004746- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4747 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4748 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4749 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4750
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004751- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4752 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4753 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4754 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4755
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004756 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4757 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4758 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4759 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4760 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4761 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4762 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4763 without losing information).
4764
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004765- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004766 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4767 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4768 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4769 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4770 module).
4771
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004772 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004773 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4774 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4775 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4776 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004777
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004778- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004779 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4780 encoding.
4781
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004782- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4783 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4784
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004785- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004786 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4787
4788- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4789 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4790 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4791 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4792
4793- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4794
4795- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4796 ON, and OFF.
4797
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004798- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4799 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4800
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004801Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004802-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004803
4804- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4805 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4806 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004807
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004808- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4809 been added: -X and -E.
4810
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004811Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004812-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004813
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004814- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4815 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4816
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004817C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004818-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004819
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004820- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4821 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4822 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4823 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4824 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4825
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004826- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4827 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4828 as long) arguments.
4829
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004830- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4831 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4832 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4833 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4834 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4835 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4836
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004837- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4838 input.
4839
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004840New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004841-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004842
4843Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004844-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004845
4846Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004847-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004848
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004849- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4850 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4851 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4852
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004853- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4854 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4855 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004856 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004857
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004858 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4859 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4860 import signal
4861 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004862
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004863 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004864 while 1:
4865 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004866 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004867 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4868 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4869 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4870 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004871
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004872
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004873What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4874===========================
4875
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004876*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4877
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004878Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004879--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004880
4881- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4882 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4883 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4884
4885- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4886 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4887 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4888 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4889 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4890 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4891 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004892
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004893- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004894 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004895 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4896 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4897 associate a docstring with a property.
4898
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004899- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4900 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4901 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4902 other built-in object types.
4903
4904- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4905 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4906 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4907 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4908 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4909
4910- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4911 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4912
4913- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4914 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004915 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004916 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4917 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4918 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4919 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4920 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4921
4922- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4923 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4924 class.
4925
4926- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4927 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4928 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4929 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4930
4931- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4932 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4933 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4934 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4935
4936- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4937 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4938
4939- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4940 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4941 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4942 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4943 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004944 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004945 with the same value as s.
4946
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004947- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4948
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004949Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004950----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004951
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004952- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4953
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004954- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4955 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4956 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4957 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4958 objects.
4959
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004960- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4961 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004962 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4963 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4964
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004965- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4966 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4967 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4968
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004969Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004970-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004971
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004972- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4973 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4974 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4975 by the instances.
4976
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004977- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4978 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4979 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4980
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004981- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4982 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4983 before the entire comparison is complete.
4984
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004985- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4986 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4987 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4988
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004989- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4990 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4991 getwriter().
4992
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004993- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4994 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4995
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004996- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004997 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4998 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4999
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005000- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5001 iterable object.
5002
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005003- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5004 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005005
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005006- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5007 authentication.
5008
5009- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5010 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005011
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005012- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005013 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5014 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5015 a sample driver.)
5016
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005017Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005018-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005019
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005020- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5021 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5022 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5023 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5024 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5025 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5026 kernel has large file support.
5027
5028- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5029 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5030 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5031 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5032 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5033
5034- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5035 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5036 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5037
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005038C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005039-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005040
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005041- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5042 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5043
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005044New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005045-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005046
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005047- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5048 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5049
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005050Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005051-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005052
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005053- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5054 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5055 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5056 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5057 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5058
5059- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5060 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5061 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5062 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5063
5064- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5065 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5066
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005067Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005068-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005069
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005070- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005071 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5072 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005073
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005074
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005075What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5076===========================
5077
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005078*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5079
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005080Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005081----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005082
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005083- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5084 big to represent as a C double.
5085
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005086- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5087 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5088 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5089 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5090 restriction).
5091
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005092- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5093 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5094 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5095 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5096 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5097
5098 >>> dir([])
5099 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5100 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5101 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5102 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5103 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5104 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5105 'reverse', 'sort']
5106
5107 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5108
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005109- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005110 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5111 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5112 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5113 OverflowError exception.
5114
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005115- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005116 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005117 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5118 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5119 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5120 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5121 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005122 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005123 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5124 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5125
5126 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5127 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5128 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5129 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005130
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005131- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005132 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5133 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5134 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5135 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5136 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5137 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5138 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5139 once it is created.
5140
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005141- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5142 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5143 (key, value) pairs.
5144
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005145- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005146 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5147 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5148
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005149- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5150 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5151 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5152 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5153 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005154
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005155- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005156 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5157 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5158
5159 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5160
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005161- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005162 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5163
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005164Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005165-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005166
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005167- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005168 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5169 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005170
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005171- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5172 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5173 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5174 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5175 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5176 in this area anymore).
5177
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005178- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5179 threading.Timer.
5180
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005181- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5182 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5183
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005184- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005185 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5186
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005187- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005188 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5189 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5190 converted to Python longs.
5191
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005192- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005193 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5194
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005195- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5196 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5197 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5198
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005199Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005200-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005201
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005202- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5203 division operators as per PEP 238.
5204
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005205Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005206-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005207
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005208- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5209 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5210 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5211 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5212
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005213C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005214-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005215
5216- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005217
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005218- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5219 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005220 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005221
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005222 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5223 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005224 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005225 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005226
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005227- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005228 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5229 module:
5230
5231 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005232
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005233 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5234 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005235
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005236 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5237 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005238
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005239 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5240
5241 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5242
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005243- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005244 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5245 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5246 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005247
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005248New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005249-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005250
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005251- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5252 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5253 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5254 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5255 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005256
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005257Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005258-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005259
5260Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005261-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005262
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005263- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5264 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5265 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5266 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005267 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5268 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5269 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5270 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5271 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005272
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005273- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005274 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5275
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005276
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005277What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5278===========================
5279
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005280*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5281
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005282Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005283-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005284
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005285- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5286 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5287
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005288- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5289 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5290 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005291
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005292- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5293 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5294 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5295 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005296
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005297- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5298
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005299- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005300
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005301Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005302-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005303
5304- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005305 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005306 the module docstring for details.
5307
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005308Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005309-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005310
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005311- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005312 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5313 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5314 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005315
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005316- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5317 Nick Mathewson.
5318
5319Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005320----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005321
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005322- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5323 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5324 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5325 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5326 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5327 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5328 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5329 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5330
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005331- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5332 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5333 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5334 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5335
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005336- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5337 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5338 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5339 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5340 come a long way).
5341
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005342- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5343 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5344 write filters for these warnings).
5345
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005346- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5347 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5348 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5349 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5350 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5351
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005352- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5353 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5354 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5355 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5356 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5357 older distribution.
5358
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005359Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005360-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005361
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005362- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5363 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005364 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005365
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005366- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5367 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5368 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5369
5370- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5371
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005372- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5373
5374- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5375
5376- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5377
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005378- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005379
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005380- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5381
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005382New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005383-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005384
5385C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005386-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005387
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005388- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5389 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5390 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5391 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5392 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5393 against buffer overruns.
5394
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005395- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005396 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5397 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005398 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5399 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5400 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5401
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005402- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5403 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5404 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5405 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5406 deprecated.
5407
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005408Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005409-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005410
5411- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5412 relevant is found.
5413
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005414
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005415What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005416===========================
5417
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005418*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5419
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005420Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005421----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005422
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005423- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5424 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5425 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5426 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5427 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5428 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5429 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5430 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005431 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005432 repaired.
5433
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005434- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005435 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005436 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5437 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5438 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5439 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5440 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5441 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5442 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5443 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5444
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005445- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5446 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5447 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5448 leading BMO character).
5449
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005450- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5451 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5452 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5453
5454 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5455 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5456 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005457
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005458 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5459 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5460 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5461 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5462 for various simple to use conversions.
5463
5464 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5465 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5466
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005467 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5468 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5469 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5470 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5471 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5472 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5473 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5474 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5475 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5476 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5477 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5478 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5479 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5480 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5481 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005482
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005483- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5484 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5485 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005486 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005487 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005488
5489 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005490 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5491 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5492 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5493 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5494 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005495 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5496 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005497
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005498 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5499 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5500 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005501 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005502
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005503- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5504 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5505 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5506 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5507 floating arithmetic,
5508
5509 x = 9007199254740992.0
5510 print long(x)
5511
5512 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5513 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5514 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5515 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5516 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5517 functions are of good quality).
5518
5519 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5520 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5521 algorithms to break.
5522
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005523- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5524 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5525 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5526 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5527 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5528 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5529 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5530 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5531 order.
5532
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005533- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5534 operation along the most common code paths.
5535
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005536- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5537 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5538
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005539- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5540 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5541 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5542 {}.update(UserDict())
5543
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005544- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5545 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5546 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5547 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5548 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5549 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5550 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5551 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5552
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005553- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005554 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005555
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005556 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005557 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5558 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005559 join() method of strings
5560 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005561 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5562 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005563 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005564 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005565
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005566- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5567 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5568
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005569- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5570 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5571
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005572- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5573 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5574 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5575 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5576
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005577- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5578 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005579 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005580 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5581 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005582
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005583- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5584
5585
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005586Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005587-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005588
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005589- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005590 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005591 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5592 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5593
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005594- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5595 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5596
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005597- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5598 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5599 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5600 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5601
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005602- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5603 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5604 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5605
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005606- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5607
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005608- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5609
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005610- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5611 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5612 that are still imported into string.py).
5613
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005614- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5615
5616- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5617 Now it does.
5618
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005619- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5620
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005621- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5622 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5623 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5624 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5625 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005626 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5627 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005628
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005629- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5630 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5631 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5632 'help(object)'.
5633
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005634Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005635-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005636
5637- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005638 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005639 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5640 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5641
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005642- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005643 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5644 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005645
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005646C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005647-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005648
5649- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5650 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005651
5652----
5653
5654**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**