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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000011
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +000015- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
16
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +000017- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
18 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
19 arguments.
20
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000021Extension modules
22-----------------
23
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +000024- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
25
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +000026- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
27 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
28 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
29
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000030- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
31
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000032- datetime changes:
33
34 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000035 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
36 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000037
Tim Peters710fb152003-01-02 19:35:54 +000038 In dt.asdatetime(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000039 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000040 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
41 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
42 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
43 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000044
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000045 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
46 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
47 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000048 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
49
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000050 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
51 by a later example coded by Guido.
52
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000053 datetimetz.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
54 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
55 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
56 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
57 ends. See new docs for details.
58
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +000059 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
60 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
61 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
62 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
63 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
64
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000065Library
66-------
67
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +000068- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
69 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
70
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +000071- realpath is now exported when doing from poxixpath import *.
72 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
73 See SF bug #659228.
74
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +000075- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
76 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
77 See SF patch #651082.
78
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +000079- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000080
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000081Tools/Demos
82-----------
83
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000084TBD
85
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000086Build
87-----
88
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +000089- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
90 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
91 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
92 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
93 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
94 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
95 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
96 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
97 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
98
99- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
100 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
101 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
102 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
103
104- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
105 from the Tools/scripts directory.
106
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000107C API
108-----
109
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000110TBD
111
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000112New platforms
113-------------
114
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000115TBD
116
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000117Tests
118-----
119
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000120TBD
121
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000122Windows
123-------
124
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000125- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
126 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
127
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000128Mac
129---
130
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000131TBD
132
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000133
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000134What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000135=================================
136
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000137*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000138
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000139Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000140--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000141
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000142- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
143
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000144- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
145 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000146 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000147 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000148 a different meaning than before.
149
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000150- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000151 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000152 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000153
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000154- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000155 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000156 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000157
158- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
159 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
160 and deallocation.
161
162- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
163 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
164
165- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
166 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
167 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
168 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
169 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
170
171- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
172 now detected by the garbage collector.
173
174- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
175 [SF bug 519621]
176
177- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
178 identifier.
179
180- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
181 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
182 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
183 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
184 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
185 [SF bug 563060]
186
187- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
188 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
189 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
190 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
191 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
192
193- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
194 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
195 not called. [SF bug #537450]
196
197- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
198
199- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
200 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
201 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
202 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
203 state of the slots would be lost.)
204
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000205Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000206-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000207
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000208- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000209 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
210 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
211 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
212 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000213 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
214 Jython 2.1.
215
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000216- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000217 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000218 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
219 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
220 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
221 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
222 these, see PEP 302.
223
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000224- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
225 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
226 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
227
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000228- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
229 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
230 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
231
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000232- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
233 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
234 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
235
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000236- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
237 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
238 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
239 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
240 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
241 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
242 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
243 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
244 releases or implementations.
245
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000246- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000247 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
248 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000249
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000250- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
251 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
252
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000253- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
254 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
255 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
256
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000257- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
258 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
259
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000260- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
261 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000262 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
263 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000264
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000265- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
266 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
267 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
268 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
269 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
270
271 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
272 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
273 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
274 pattern.
275
276 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
277 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
278 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
279 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
280
281 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
282 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
283 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
284 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
285 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
286 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
287
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000288- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
289 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
290 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
291 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
292 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
293 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
294 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
295 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000296
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000297- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
298 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
299 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
300 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
301 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000302 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
303 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
304 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
305 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
306 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
307 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
308 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000309
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000310- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
311 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
312
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000313- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
314 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
315 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
316 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
317 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
318 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
319 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
320 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
321 to Zack Weinberg!
322
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000323- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
324 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
325 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
326 type. This has been fixed now.
327
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000328- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
329 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
330 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
331
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000332- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
333 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
334 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
335 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
336 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
337 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
338 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
339 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000340 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000341
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000342- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
343 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
344 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000345
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000346- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
347 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
348 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
349 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
350 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
351 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
352 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
353 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000354 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000355 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
356 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
357
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000358- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
359 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
360 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
361 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
362 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
363 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
364 this.)
365
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000366- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
367 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000368 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000369 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000370 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
371 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000372 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
373 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000374
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000375- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
376 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
377 currently running.
378
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000379- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
380 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
381 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
382 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
383
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000384- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
385 as directory names.
386
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000387- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
388 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
389
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000390- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
391 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
392
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000393- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000394 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
395 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000396
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000397- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
398 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
399 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
400 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
401 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
402
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000403- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
404 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
405 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
406 removed.
407
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000408- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
409 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
410 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
411
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000412- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
413 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
414 to __debug__.
415
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000416- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
417 string to the left with zeros. For example,
418 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
419
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000420- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
421 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
422 deprecated now.
423
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000424- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
425 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
426 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000427
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000428- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
429 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
430 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
431 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
432 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000433
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000434- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
435 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
436
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000437- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
438 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
439 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000440 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000441 is backward compatible.
442
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000443- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
444 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
445 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
446 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
447 could access a pointer to freed memory.
448
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000449- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
450 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
451 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
452 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
453 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
454 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000455
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000456- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
457 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
458
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000459- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
460 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
461
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000462- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
463 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
464 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
465 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
466 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
467
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000468- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
469 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
470 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
471
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000472- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000473 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
474
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000475- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
476 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
477 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000478
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000479- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
480 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
481
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000482- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
483 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
484 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
485
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000486Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000487-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000488
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000489- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
490
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000491- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
492 archives.
493
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000494- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
495 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
496 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
497
498 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
499
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000500- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
501 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
502 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000503 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000504
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000505- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
506 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
507 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
508 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
509 3.0 to 4.1.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000510
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000511- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
512 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000513
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000514- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
515
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000516- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
517 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
518
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000519- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
520 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
521 supported.
522
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000523- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
524
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000525- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
526 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000527
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000528- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
529 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
530
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000531- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
532
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000533- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
534 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
535
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000536- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
537 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
538 functions but callable type objects.
539
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000540- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000541 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000542 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000543
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000544- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
545 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000546
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000547- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
548 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000549
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000550- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
551 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
552 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
553 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
554
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000555- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
556 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000557
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000558- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
559 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
560 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
561 and __imul__.
562
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000563- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000564 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
565 is called.
566
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000567- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
568 been added where available.
569
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000570- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
571 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
572 interpreter was compiled.
573
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000574- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
575 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
576 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000577 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000578 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
579 1, not 2.
580
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000581- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
582 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
583 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
584 limit.
585
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000586- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
587 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
588 bug #623464.
589
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +0000590- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
591 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
592 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
593 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
594
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000595Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000596-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000597
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +0000598- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
599
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000600- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
601 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
602 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
603 with Python 2.3a2.
604
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000605- os.path exposes getctime.
606
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000607- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
608 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
609 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
610 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
611 unit tests of floating point results.
612
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000613- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
614 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
615 has been increased.
616
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000617- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
618 executed.
619
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000620- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
621 postinstallation script.
622
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000623- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
624 test the current module.
625
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000626- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
627 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
628 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
629 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
630 this behavior needs to be controlled.
631
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000632- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000633 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000634 Ward's Optik package.
635
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000636- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
637 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
638 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
639 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
640
641- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
642 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000643 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000644
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000645- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
646 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
647 shelf are binary pickles.
648
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000649- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
650 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
651
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000652- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
653 modules are iterators now.
654
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000655- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
656 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
657 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
658 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
659 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
660 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000661
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000662- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
663 with their entity value.
664
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000665- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
666
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000667- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
668 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000669
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000670- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
671 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000672 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000673
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000674- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
675 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
676 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
677 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
678 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
679 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
680 main():
681
682 import locale
683 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
684
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000685- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
686 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
687
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000688- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
689 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
690 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
691 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
692 to the new standard.
693
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000694- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
695 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
696 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
697 an extension to the database.
698
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000699- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
700 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
701 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
702 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000703 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000704
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000705- Added operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to a**b.
706
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000707- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000708 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000709
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000710- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
711 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
712 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
713 bounded integers.
714
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +0000715- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
716 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
717 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
718 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
719 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
720 in existence.
721
722 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
723 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
724 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
725 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
726 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
727 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
728
729 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
730 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
731 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
732 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
733
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000734- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
735 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
736 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
737
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000738- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
739
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000740- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
741 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
742 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
743 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
744
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000745- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
746 argument.
747
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000748- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
749 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
750 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
751 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
752 [SF patch 560794].
753
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000754- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
755 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
756 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000757 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
758 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
759 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000760
761- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
762 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000763
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000764- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
765 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
766 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
767 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000768
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000769- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
770 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
771 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
772 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
773 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
774
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000775- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000776
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +0000777- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
778
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000779- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
780 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
781 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
782 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
783 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
784 identical to None.
785
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000786- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
787 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
788 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
789 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
790 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
791 results now.
792
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000793- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
794 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
795
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000796- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
797 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
798 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
799 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
800 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
801 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
802 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
803 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
804
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000805- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
806
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000807- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
808 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
809
810- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
811 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
812 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
813 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
814 and other systems.
815
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000816- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
817 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
818 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
819 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 +0000820 work well with these.
821
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000822- compileall now supports quiet operation.
823
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000824- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000825 connections.
826
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000827- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
828 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
829 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
830
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000831- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
832 sets
833
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000834- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
835 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
836 name.
837
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000838- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
839 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
840 passed in.
841
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000842- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000843 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000844 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
845 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000846
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000847- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
848
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000849- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
850
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000851- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
852 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
853 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
854
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000855- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
856 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
857 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
858 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +0000859 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000860
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000861- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000862 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000863 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000864
865- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
866 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
867 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
868
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000869- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +0000870 the value of its expression argument.
871
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000872- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
873 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
874 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
875
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +0000876- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
877 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
878 skipstone browser was included.
879
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +0000880- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
881 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
882
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000883Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000884-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000885
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +0000886- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
887 names in addition to accepting file names.
888
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +0000889- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
890 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
891 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
892 still used and useful.)
893
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000894- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
895 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
896 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
897 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +0000898
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000899- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
900 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
901 the generated binary.
902
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000903Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000904-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000905
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +0000906- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
907
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000908- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
909 except in the hands of experts.
910
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000911- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000912 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
913 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
914 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +0000915
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +0000916- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
917 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
918 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
919 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
920 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
921 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
922 builds.
923
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000924- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
925 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
926 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
927 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
928 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
929 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
930 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
931 new type.
932
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000933- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +0000934
935 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
936 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
937 positive infinities.
938
939 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
940 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
941 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
942 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
943 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
944 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
945 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
946
947 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
948
949 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
950
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +0000951- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
952 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
953 size of the executable.
954
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000955- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
956 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
957 configure script. On other platforms, remove
958 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +0000959
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +0000960- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
961
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +0000962- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
963 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
964 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +0000965
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +0000966- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
967 well as Unix.
968
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +0000969- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
970 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
971 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
972 modules in the README file for details.
973
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000974C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000975-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000976
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000977- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
978 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000979 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +0000980 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000981 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000982
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000983- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
984 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
985 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
986 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
987 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
988 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
989 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
990 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
991 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
992 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
993 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
994 aligned.)
995
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +0000996- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
997 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
998 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
999
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001000- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1001 level.
1002
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001003- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1004 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1005 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1006 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1007 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1008
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001009- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1010 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1011 code.
1012
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001013- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1014 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1015 adjusting for negative indices.
1016
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001017- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1018 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1019 object.
1020
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001021- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1022 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1023 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1024
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001025- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1026 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001027
1028- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1029
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001030- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1031 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1032 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1033 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1034
1035- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1036
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001037- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001038
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001039- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001040 without going through the buffer API.
1041
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001042- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001043
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001044- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1045 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1046 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1047 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1048
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001049- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1050 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1051
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001052- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001053 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1054
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001055New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001056-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001057
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001058- OpenVMS is now supported.
1059
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001060- AtheOS is now supported.
1061
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001062- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1063
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001064- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1065
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001066Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001067-----
1068
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001069- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1070 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1071 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001072
1073Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001074-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001075
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001076- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1077 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1078 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1079 bugs.
1080 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001081 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1082 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1083 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001084 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001085
1086- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001087 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001088
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001089- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1090 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1091
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001092- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1093 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1094 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1095 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1096
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001097- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1098 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1099 use files" uninstall option).
1100
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001101- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1102
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001103- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1104 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1105
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001106- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1107 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1108 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1109
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001110- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1111 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1112 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1113 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1114 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001115 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1116 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1117 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001118
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001119- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001120 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001121 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1122 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1123 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1124 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1125 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1126 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1127 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1128 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1129 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1130 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1131 work around.
1132
1133- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1134 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1135 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1136 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1137 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1138 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1139 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1140 specified with O_CREAT too).
1141
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001142Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001143----
1144
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001145- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001146
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001147- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1148 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1149 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1150
1151- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1152 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1153 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1154 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1155 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1156 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1157 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1158 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001159
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001160- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1161 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1162 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001163
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001164- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1165 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1166 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1167 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1168 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001169
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001170- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1171 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1172 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001173
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001174- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1175 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001176
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001177- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1178 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1179 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1180 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1181 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001182
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001183- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1184 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1185 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1186
1187- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1188 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1189 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001190
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001191- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1192 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1193 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1194 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1195 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001196
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001197- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1198 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001199
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001200- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1201 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001202
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001203What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001204===============================
1205
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001206*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1207
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001208Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001209--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001210
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001211- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1212 with a custom metaclass.
1213
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001214Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001215-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001216
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001217- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1218 are proxies.
1219
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001220Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001221-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001222
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001223- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1224 very short strings.
1225
1226- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1227 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1228 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1229 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1230 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1231
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001232Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001233-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001234
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001235- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1236 close or delete time).
1237
1238- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1239 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1240
1241- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1242
1243- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001244 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001245
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001246Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001247-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001248
1249Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001250-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001251
1252C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001253-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001254
1255New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001256-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001257
1258Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001259-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001260
1261Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001262-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001263
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001264- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1265
1266- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1267 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1268
1269- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1270 deleted at process exit time.
1271
1272- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1273 in backslash.
1274
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001275Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001276----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001277
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001278- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1279 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1280 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1281
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001282
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001283What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001284===========================
1285
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001286*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1287
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001288Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001289--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001290
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001291- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1292 been extensively updated. See
1293
1294 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1295
1296 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1297
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001298- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1299 deleted!
1300
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001301- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1302 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1303 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1304 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1305 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1306
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001307- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1308
1309 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1310 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1311
1312 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1313 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1314 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1315 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1316 supported anyway.
1317
1318 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1319 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1320
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001321- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1322 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1323 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1324 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1325 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001326
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001327- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1328 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1329 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1330
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001331Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001332-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001333
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001334- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1335 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1336 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1337 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1338 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1339 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001340 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1341 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1342 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1343 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001344
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001345- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1346 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1347 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1348
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001349Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001350-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001351
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001352- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1353
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001354Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001355-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001356
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001357- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1358 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1359 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1360 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1361 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1362 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1363
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001364- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1365
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001366- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1367
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001368- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1369
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001370- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1371 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1372 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1373
1374- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1375
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001376Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001377-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001378
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001379- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1380 off a search on Google.
1381
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001382Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001383-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001384
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001385- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1386 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1387 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1388 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1389 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1390 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1391 other platforms should do likewise.
1392
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001393- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1394 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1395 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1396
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001397C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001398-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001399
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001400- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1401 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1402 producing key-value pairs.
1403
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001404- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001405 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001406 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1407 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1408 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1409 previously went unchallenged.
1410
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001411New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001412-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001413
1414Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001415-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001416
1417Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001418-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001419
1420Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001421----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001422
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001423- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1424 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001425
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001426- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1427 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1428 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1429 home.
1430
1431
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001432What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001433===========================
1434
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001435*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1436
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001437Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001438--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001439
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001440- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1441 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001442
1443 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001444 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001445
1446 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1447 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001448 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001449 This needs to be documented.
1450
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001451- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1452 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1453
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001454- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1455 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1456 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1457
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001458- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1459 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1460
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001461- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1462 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1463 class forbids it).
1464
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001465- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1466 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1467 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1468
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001469- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1470
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001471Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001472-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001473
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001474- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1475 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001476 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001477
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001478- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1479 (like 1 + '').
1480
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001481Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001482-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001483
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001484- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1485 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1486 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1487 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001488 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001489 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1490
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001491- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1492 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1493 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1494 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1495
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001496- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1497 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001498 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1499 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1500 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001501
1502- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1503 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001504
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001505- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1506 bytes on its input.
1507
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001508Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001509-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001510
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001511- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001512 convenience function.
1513
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001514- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1515 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1516 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001517 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1518 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1519 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1520 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1521 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1522 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001523
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001524- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1525 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1526 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1527 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1528
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001529- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1530 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1531 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1532
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001533- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1534 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1535 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1536 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1537
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001538- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1539 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001540 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001541 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1542 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1543 new -l and -e options.
1544
1545- statcache is now deprecated.
1546
1547- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1548 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001549 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001550 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1551 time properly taken into account.
1552
1553- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1554 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1555 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1556 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1557
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001558Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001559-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001560
1561Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001562-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001563
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001564- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1565 is built with libdb3 if available.
1566
1567- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1568
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001569C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001570-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001571
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001572- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1573 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1574 PySequence_Size().
1575
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001576- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1577
1578- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1579 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1580 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1581
1582- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1583 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1584
1585- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1586 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1587
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001588New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001589-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001590
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001591- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1592 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1593
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001594- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1595 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1596
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001597- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1598
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001599Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001600-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001601
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001602- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1603 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1604
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001605Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001606-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001607
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001608Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001609----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001610
1611- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1612 removed completely in the next release.
1613
1614- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1615 OSX.
1616
1617- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1618 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1619
1620- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1621
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001622
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001623What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001624===========================
1625
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001626*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1627
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001628Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001629--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001630
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001631- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001632 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001633 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001634 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1635 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001636 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1637 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001638 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1639 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001640
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001641- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1642 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1643
1644- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1645 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1646
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001647Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001648-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001649
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001650- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1651 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1652 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1653 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1654 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1655 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1656 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1657 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1658
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001659- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1660 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1661 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1662 example).
1663
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001664- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001665 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001666 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001667 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001668
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001669- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1670 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1671 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001672 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001673
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001674- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1675 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1676 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1677 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1678 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1679 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1680
1681 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1682
1683 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1684
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001685Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001686-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001687
1688- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1689
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001690- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1691
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001692- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1693 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001694
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001695- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1696 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1697 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1698 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1699 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1700 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001701 attributes.
1702
1703- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1704 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1705 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001706
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001707- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1708 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1709 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001710
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001711- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1712 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1713 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001714 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1715 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1716
1717- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1718 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001719
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001720Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001721-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001722
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001723- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1724 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1725
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001726- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1727 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1728 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1729 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1730
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001731- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1732 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1733 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1734 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1735
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001736 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1737 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1738 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1739 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1740 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1741 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1742 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1743 without losing information).
1744
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001745- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001746 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1747 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1748 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1749 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1750 module).
1751
1752 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1753 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1754 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1755 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1756 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001757
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001758- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001759 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1760 encoding.
1761
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001762- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1763 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1764
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001765- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001766 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1767
1768- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1769 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1770 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1771 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1772
1773- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1774
1775- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1776 ON, and OFF.
1777
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001778- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1779 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1780
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001781Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001782-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001783
1784- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1785 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1786 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001787
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001788- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1789 been added: -X and -E.
1790
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001791Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001792-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001793
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001794- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1795 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1796
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001797C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001798-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001799
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001800- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1801 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1802 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1803 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1804 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1805
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001806- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1807 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1808 as long) arguments.
1809
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001810- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1811 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1812 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1813 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1814 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1815 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1816
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001817- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1818 input.
1819
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001820New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001821-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001822
1823Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001824-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001825
1826Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001827-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001828
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001829- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1830 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1831 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1832
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001833- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1834 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1835 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001836 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001837
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001838 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1839 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1840 import signal
1841 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001842
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001843 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001844 while 1:
1845 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001846 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001847 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1848 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1849 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1850 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001851
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001852
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001853What's New in Python 2.2a4?
1854===========================
1855
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001856*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
1857
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001858Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001859--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001860
1861- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1862 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1863 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1864
1865- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1866 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1867 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1868 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1869 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1870 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1871 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001872
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001873- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001874 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001875 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1876 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1877 associate a docstring with a property.
1878
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001879- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1880 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1881 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1882 other built-in object types.
1883
1884- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1885 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1886 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1887 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1888 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1889
1890- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1891 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1892
1893- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1894 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001895 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001896 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1897 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1898 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1899 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1900 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1901
1902- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1903 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1904 class.
1905
1906- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1907 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1908 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1909 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1910
1911- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1912 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1913 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
1914 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
1915
1916- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
1917 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
1918
1919- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
1920 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
1921 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
1922 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
1923 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001924 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001925 with the same value as s.
1926
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001927- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
1928
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001929Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001930----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001931
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00001932- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
1933
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00001934- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
1935 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
1936 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
1937 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
1938 objects.
1939
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001940- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
1941 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00001942 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
1943 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
1944
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001945- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
1946 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
1947 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
1948
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001949Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001950-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001951
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00001952- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1953 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
1954 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
1955 by the instances.
1956
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00001957- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
1958 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
1959 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
1960
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001961- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
1962 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
1963 before the entire comparison is complete.
1964
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00001965- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1966 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
1967 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
1968
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00001969- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
1970 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
1971 getwriter().
1972
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001973- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
1974 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
1975
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00001976- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001977 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
1978 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
1979
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00001980- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
1981 iterable object.
1982
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001983- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
1984 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001985
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001986- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
1987 authentication.
1988
1989- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
1990 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001991
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001992- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001993 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
1994 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
1995 a sample driver.)
1996
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001997Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001998-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001999
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002000- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2001 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2002 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2003 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2004 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2005 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2006 kernel has large file support.
2007
2008- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2009 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2010 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2011 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2012 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2013
2014- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2015 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2016 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2017
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002018C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002019-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002020
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002021- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2022 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2023
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002024New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002025-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002026
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002027- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2028 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2029
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002030Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002031-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002032
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002033- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2034 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2035 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2036 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2037 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2038
2039- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2040 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2041 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2042 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2043
2044- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2045 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2046
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002047Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002048-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002049
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002050- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002051 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2052 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002053
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002054
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002055What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2056===========================
2057
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002058*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2059
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002060Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002061----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002062
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002063- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2064 big to represent as a C double.
2065
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002066- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2067 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2068 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2069 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2070 restriction).
2071
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002072- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2073 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2074 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2075 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2076 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2077
2078 >>> dir([])
2079 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2080 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2081 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2082 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2083 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2084 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2085 'reverse', 'sort']
2086
2087 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2088
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002089- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002090 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2091 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2092 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2093 OverflowError exception.
2094
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002095- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002096 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002097 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2098 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2099 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2100 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2101 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002102 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002103 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2104 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2105
2106 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2107 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2108 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2109 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002110
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002111- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002112 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2113 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2114 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2115 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2116 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2117 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2118 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2119 once it is created.
2120
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002121- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2122 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2123 (key, value) pairs.
2124
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002125- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002126 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2127 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2128
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002129- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2130 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2131 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2132 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2133 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002134
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002135- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002136 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2137 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2138
2139 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2140
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002141- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002142 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2143
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002144Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002145-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002146
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002147- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002148 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2149 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002150
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002151- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2152 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2153 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2154 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2155 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2156 in this area anymore).
2157
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002158- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2159 threading.Timer.
2160
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002161- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2162 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2163
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002164- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002165 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2166
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002167- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002168 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2169 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2170 converted to Python longs.
2171
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002172- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002173 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2174
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002175- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2176 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2177 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2178
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002179Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002180-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002181
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002182- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2183 division operators as per PEP 238.
2184
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002185Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002186-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002187
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002188- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2189 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2190 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2191 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2192
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002193C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002194-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002195
2196- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002197
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002198- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2199 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002200 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002201
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002202 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2203 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002204 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002205 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002206
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002207- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002208 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2209 module:
2210
2211 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002212
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002213 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2214 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002215
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002216 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2217 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002218
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002219 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2220
2221 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2222
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002223- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002224 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2225 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2226 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002227
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002228New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002229-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002230
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002231- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2232 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2233 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2234 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2235 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002236
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002237Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002238-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002239
2240Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002241-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002242
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002243- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2244 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2245 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2246 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002247 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2248 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2249 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2250 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2251 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002252
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002253- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002254 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2255
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002256
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002257What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2258===========================
2259
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002260*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2261
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002262Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002263-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002264
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002265- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2266 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2267
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002268- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2269 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2270 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002271
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002272- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2273 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2274 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2275 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002276
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002277- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2278
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002279- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002280
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002281Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002282-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002283
2284- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002285 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002286 the module docstring for details.
2287
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002288Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002289-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002290
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002291- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002292 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2293 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2294 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002295
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002296- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2297 Nick Mathewson.
2298
2299Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002300----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002301
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002302- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2303 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2304 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2305 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2306 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2307 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2308 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2309 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2310
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002311- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2312 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2313 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2314 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2315
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002316- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2317 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2318 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2319 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2320 come a long way).
2321
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002322- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2323 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2324 write filters for these warnings).
2325
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002326- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2327 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2328 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2329 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2330 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2331
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002332- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2333 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2334 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2335 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2336 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2337 older distribution.
2338
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002339Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002340-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002341
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002342- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2343 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002344 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002345
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002346- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2347 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2348 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2349
2350- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2351
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002352- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2353
2354- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2355
2356- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2357
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002358- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002359
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002360- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2361
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002362New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002363-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002364
2365C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002366-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002367
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002368- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2369 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2370 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2371 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2372 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2373 against buffer overruns.
2374
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002375- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002376 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2377 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002378 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2379 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2380 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2381
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002382- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2383 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2384 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2385 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2386 deprecated.
2387
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002388Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002389-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002390
2391- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2392 relevant is found.
2393
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002394
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002395What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002396===========================
2397
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002398*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2399
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002400Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002401----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002402
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002403- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2404 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2405 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2406 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2407 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2408 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2409 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2410 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002411 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002412 repaired.
2413
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002414- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002415 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002416 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2417 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2418 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2419 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2420 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2421 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2422 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2423 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2424
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002425- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2426 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2427 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2428 leading BMO character).
2429
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002430- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2431 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2432 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2433
2434 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2435 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2436 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002437
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002438 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2439 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2440 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2441 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2442 for various simple to use conversions.
2443
2444 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2445 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2446
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002447 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2448 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2449 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2450 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2451 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2452 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2453 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2454 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2455 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2456 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2457 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2458 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2459 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2460 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2461 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002462
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002463- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2464 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2465 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002466 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002467 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002468
2469 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002470 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2471 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2472 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2473 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2474 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002475 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2476 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002477
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002478 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2479 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2480 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002481 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002482
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002483- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2484 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2485 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2486 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2487 floating arithmetic,
2488
2489 x = 9007199254740992.0
2490 print long(x)
2491
2492 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2493 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2494 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2495 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2496 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2497 functions are of good quality).
2498
2499 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2500 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2501 algorithms to break.
2502
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002503- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2504 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2505 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2506 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2507 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2508 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2509 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2510 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2511 order.
2512
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002513- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2514 operation along the most common code paths.
2515
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002516- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2517 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2518
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002519- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2520 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2521 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2522 {}.update(UserDict())
2523
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002524- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2525 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2526 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2527 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2528 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2529 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2530 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2531 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2532
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002533- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002534 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002535
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002536 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002537 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2538 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002539 join() method of strings
2540 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002541 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2542 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002543 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002544 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002545
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002546- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2547 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2548
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002549- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2550 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2551
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002552- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2553 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2554 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2555 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2556
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002557- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2558 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002559 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002560 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2561 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002562
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002563- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2564
2565
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002566Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002567-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002568
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002569- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002570 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002571 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2572 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2573
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002574- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2575 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2576
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002577- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2578 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2579 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2580 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2581
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002582- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2583 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2584 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2585
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002586- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2587
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002588- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2589
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002590- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2591 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2592 that are still imported into string.py).
2593
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002594- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2595
2596- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2597 Now it does.
2598
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002599- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2600
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002601- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2602 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2603 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2604 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2605 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002606 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2607 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002608
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002609- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2610 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2611 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2612 'help(object)'.
2613
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002614Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002615-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002616
2617- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002618 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002619 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2620 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2621
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002622- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002623 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2624 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002625
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002626C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002627-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002628
2629- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2630 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002631
2632----
2633
2634**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**