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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
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000125- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
126 absolute pathname.
127
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000128- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
129 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
130
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000131Mac
132---
133
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000134TBD
135
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000136
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000137What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000138=================================
139
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000140*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000141
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000142Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000143--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000144
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000145- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
146
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000147- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
148 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000149 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000150 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000151 a different meaning than before.
152
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000153- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000154 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000155 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000156
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000157- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000158 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000159 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000160
161- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
162 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
163 and deallocation.
164
165- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
166 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
167
168- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
169 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
170 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
171 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
172 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
173
174- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
175 now detected by the garbage collector.
176
177- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
178 [SF bug 519621]
179
180- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
181 identifier.
182
183- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
184 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
185 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
186 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
187 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
188 [SF bug 563060]
189
190- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
191 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
192 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
193 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
194 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
195
196- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
197 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
198 not called. [SF bug #537450]
199
200- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
201
202- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
203 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
204 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
205 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
206 state of the slots would be lost.)
207
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000208Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000209-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000210
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000211- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000212 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
213 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
214 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
215 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000216 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
217 Jython 2.1.
218
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000219- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000220 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000221 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
222 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
223 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
224 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
225 these, see PEP 302.
226
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000227- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
228 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
229 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
230
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000231- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
232 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
233 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
234
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000235- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
236 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
237 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
238
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000239- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
240 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
241 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
242 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
243 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
244 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
245 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
246 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
247 releases or implementations.
248
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000249- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000250 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
251 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000252
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000253- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
254 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
255
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000256- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
257 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
258 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
259
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000260- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
261 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
262
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000263- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
264 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000265 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
266 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000267
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000268- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
269 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
270 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
271 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
272 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
273
274 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
275 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
276 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
277 pattern.
278
279 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
280 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
281 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
282 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
283
284 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
285 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
286 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
287 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
288 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
289 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
290
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000291- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
292 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
293 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
294 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
295 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
296 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
297 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
298 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000299
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000300- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
301 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
302 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
303 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
304 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000305 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
306 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
307 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
308 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
309 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
310 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
311 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000312
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000313- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
314 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
315
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000316- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
317 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
318 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
319 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
320 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
321 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
322 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
323 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
324 to Zack Weinberg!
325
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000326- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
327 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
328 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
329 type. This has been fixed now.
330
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000331- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
332 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
333 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
334
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000335- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
336 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
337 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
338 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
339 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
340 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
341 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
342 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000343 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000344
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000345- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
346 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
347 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000348
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000349- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
350 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
351 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
352 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
353 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
354 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
355 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
356 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000357 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000358 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
359 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
360
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000361- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
362 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
363 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
364 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
365 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
366 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
367 this.)
368
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000369- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
370 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000371 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000372 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000373 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
374 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000375 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
376 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000377
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000378- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
379 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
380 currently running.
381
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000382- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
383 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
384 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
385 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
386
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000387- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
388 as directory names.
389
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000390- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
391 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
392
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000393- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
394 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
395
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000396- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000397 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
398 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000399
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000400- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
401 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
402 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
403 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
404 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
405
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000406- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
407 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
408 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
409 removed.
410
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000411- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
412 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
413 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
414
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000415- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
416 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
417 to __debug__.
418
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000419- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
420 string to the left with zeros. For example,
421 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
422
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000423- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
424 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
425 deprecated now.
426
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000427- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
428 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
429 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000430
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000431- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
432 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
433 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
434 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
435 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000436
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000437- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
438 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
439
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000440- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
441 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
442 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000443 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000444 is backward compatible.
445
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000446- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
447 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
448 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
449 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
450 could access a pointer to freed memory.
451
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000452- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
453 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
454 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
455 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
456 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
457 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000458
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000459- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
460 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
461
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000462- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
463 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
464
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000465- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
466 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
467 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
468 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
469 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
470
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000471- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
472 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
473 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
474
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000475- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000476 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
477
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000478- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
479 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
480 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000481
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000482- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
483 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
484
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000485- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
486 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
487 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
488
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000489Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000490-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000491
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000492- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
493
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000494- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
495 archives.
496
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000497- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
498 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
499 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
500
501 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
502
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000503- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
504 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
505 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000506 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000507
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000508- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
509 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
510 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
511 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
512 3.0 to 4.1.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000513
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000514- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
515 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000516
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000517- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
518
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000519- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
520 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
521
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000522- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
523 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
524 supported.
525
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000526- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
527
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000528- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
529 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000530
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000531- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
532 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
533
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000534- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
535
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000536- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
537 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
538
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000539- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
540 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
541 functions but callable type objects.
542
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000543- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000544 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000545 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000546
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000547- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
548 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000549
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000550- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
551 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000552
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000553- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
554 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
555 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
556 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
557
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000558- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
559 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000560
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000561- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
562 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
563 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
564 and __imul__.
565
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000566- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000567 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
568 is called.
569
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000570- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
571 been added where available.
572
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000573- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
574 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
575 interpreter was compiled.
576
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000577- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
578 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
579 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000580 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000581 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
582 1, not 2.
583
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000584- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
585 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
586 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
587 limit.
588
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000589- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
590 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
591 bug #623464.
592
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +0000593- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
594 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
595 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
596 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
597
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000598Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000599-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000600
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +0000601- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
602
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000603- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
604 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
605 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
606 with Python 2.3a2.
607
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000608- os.path exposes getctime.
609
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000610- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
611 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
612 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
613 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
614 unit tests of floating point results.
615
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000616- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
617 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
618 has been increased.
619
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000620- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
621 executed.
622
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000623- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
624 postinstallation script.
625
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000626- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
627 test the current module.
628
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000629- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
630 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
631 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
632 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
633 this behavior needs to be controlled.
634
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000635- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000636 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000637 Ward's Optik package.
638
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000639- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
640 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
641 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
642 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
643
644- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
645 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000646 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000647
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000648- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
649 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
650 shelf are binary pickles.
651
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000652- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
653 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
654
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000655- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
656 modules are iterators now.
657
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000658- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
659 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
660 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
661 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
662 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
663 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000664
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000665- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
666 with their entity value.
667
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000668- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
669
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000670- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
671 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000672
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000673- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
674 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000675 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000676
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000677- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
678 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
679 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
680 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
681 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
682 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
683 main():
684
685 import locale
686 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
687
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000688- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
689 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
690
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000691- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
692 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
693 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
694 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
695 to the new standard.
696
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000697- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
698 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
699 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
700 an extension to the database.
701
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000702- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
703 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
704 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
705 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000706 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000707
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000708- Added operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to a**b.
709
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000710- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000711 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000712
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000713- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
714 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
715 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
716 bounded integers.
717
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +0000718- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
719 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
720 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
721 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
722 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
723 in existence.
724
725 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
726 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
727 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
728 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
729 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
730 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
731
732 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
733 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
734 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
735 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
736
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000737- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
738 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
739 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
740
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000741- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
742
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000743- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
744 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
745 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
746 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
747
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000748- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
749 argument.
750
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000751- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
752 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
753 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
754 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
755 [SF patch 560794].
756
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000757- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
758 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
759 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000760 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
761 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
762 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000763
764- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
765 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000766
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000767- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
768 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
769 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
770 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000771
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000772- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
773 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
774 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
775 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
776 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
777
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000778- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000779
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +0000780- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
781
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000782- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
783 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
784 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
785 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
786 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
787 identical to None.
788
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000789- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
790 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
791 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
792 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
793 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
794 results now.
795
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000796- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
797 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
798
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000799- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
800 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
801 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
802 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
803 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
804 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
805 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
806 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
807
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000808- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
809
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000810- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
811 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
812
813- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
814 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
815 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
816 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
817 and other systems.
818
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000819- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
820 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
821 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
822 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 +0000823 work well with these.
824
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000825- compileall now supports quiet operation.
826
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000827- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000828 connections.
829
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000830- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
831 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
832 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
833
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000834- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
835 sets
836
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000837- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
838 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
839 name.
840
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000841- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
842 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
843 passed in.
844
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000845- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000846 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000847 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
848 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000849
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000850- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
851
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000852- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
853
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000854- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
855 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
856 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
857
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000858- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
859 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
860 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
861 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +0000862 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000863
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000864- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000865 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000866 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000867
868- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
869 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
870 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
871
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000872- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +0000873 the value of its expression argument.
874
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000875- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
876 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
877 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
878
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +0000879- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
880 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
881 skipstone browser was included.
882
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +0000883- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
884 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
885
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000886Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000887-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000888
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +0000889- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
890 names in addition to accepting file names.
891
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +0000892- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
893 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
894 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
895 still used and useful.)
896
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000897- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
898 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
899 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
900 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +0000901
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000902- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
903 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
904 the generated binary.
905
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000906Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000907-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000908
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +0000909- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
910
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000911- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
912 except in the hands of experts.
913
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000914- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000915 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
916 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
917 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +0000918
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +0000919- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
920 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
921 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
922 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
923 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
924 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
925 builds.
926
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000927- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
928 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
929 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
930 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
931 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
932 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
933 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
934 new type.
935
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000936- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +0000937
938 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
939 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
940 positive infinities.
941
942 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
943 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
944 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
945 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
946 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
947 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
948 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
949
950 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
951
952 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
953
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +0000954- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
955 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
956 size of the executable.
957
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000958- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
959 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
960 configure script. On other platforms, remove
961 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +0000962
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +0000963- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
964
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +0000965- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
966 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
967 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +0000968
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +0000969- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
970 well as Unix.
971
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +0000972- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
973 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
974 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
975 modules in the README file for details.
976
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000977C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000978-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000979
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000980- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
981 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000982 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +0000983 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000984 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000985
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000986- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
987 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
988 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
989 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
990 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
991 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
992 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
993 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
994 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
995 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
996 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
997 aligned.)
998
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +0000999- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1000 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1001 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1002
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001003- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1004 level.
1005
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001006- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1007 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1008 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1009 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1010 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1011
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001012- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1013 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1014 code.
1015
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001016- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1017 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1018 adjusting for negative indices.
1019
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001020- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1021 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1022 object.
1023
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001024- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1025 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1026 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1027
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001028- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1029 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001030
1031- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1032
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001033- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1034 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1035 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1036 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1037
1038- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1039
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001040- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001041
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001042- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001043 without going through the buffer API.
1044
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001045- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001046
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001047- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1048 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1049 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1050 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1051
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001052- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1053 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1054
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001055- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001056 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1057
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001058New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001059-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001060
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001061- OpenVMS is now supported.
1062
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001063- AtheOS is now supported.
1064
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001065- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1066
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001067- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1068
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001069Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001070-----
1071
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001072- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1073 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1074 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001075
1076Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001077-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001078
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001079- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1080 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1081 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1082 bugs.
1083 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001084 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1085 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1086 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001087 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001088
1089- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001090 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001091
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001092- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1093 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1094
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001095- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1096 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1097 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1098 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1099
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001100- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1101 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1102 use files" uninstall option).
1103
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001104- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1105
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001106- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1107 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1108
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001109- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1110 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1111 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1112
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001113- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1114 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1115 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1116 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1117 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001118 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1119 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1120 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001121
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001122- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001123 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001124 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1125 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1126 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1127 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1128 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1129 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1130 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1131 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1132 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1133 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1134 work around.
1135
1136- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1137 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1138 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1139 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1140 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1141 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1142 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1143 specified with O_CREAT too).
1144
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001145Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001146----
1147
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001148- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001149
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001150- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1151 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1152 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1153
1154- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1155 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1156 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1157 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1158 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1159 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1160 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1161 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001162
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001163- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1164 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1165 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001166
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001167- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1168 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1169 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1170 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1171 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001172
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001173- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1174 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1175 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001176
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001177- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1178 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001179
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001180- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1181 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1182 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1183 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1184 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001185
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001186- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1187 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1188 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1189
1190- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1191 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1192 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001193
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001194- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1195 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1196 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1197 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1198 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001199
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001200- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1201 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001202
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001203- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1204 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001205
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001206What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001207===============================
1208
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001209*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1210
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001211Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001212--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001213
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001214- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1215 with a custom metaclass.
1216
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001217Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001218-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001219
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001220- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1221 are proxies.
1222
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001223Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001224-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001225
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001226- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1227 very short strings.
1228
1229- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1230 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1231 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1232 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1233 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1234
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001235Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001236-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001237
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001238- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1239 close or delete time).
1240
1241- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1242 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1243
1244- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1245
1246- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001247 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001248
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001249Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001250-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001251
1252Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001253-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001254
1255C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001256-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001257
1258New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001259-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001260
1261Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001262-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001263
1264Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001265-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001266
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001267- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1268
1269- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1270 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1271
1272- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1273 deleted at process exit time.
1274
1275- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1276 in backslash.
1277
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001278Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001279----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001280
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001281- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1282 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1283 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1284
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001285
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001286What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001287===========================
1288
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001289*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1290
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001291Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001292--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001293
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001294- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1295 been extensively updated. See
1296
1297 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1298
1299 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1300
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001301- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1302 deleted!
1303
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001304- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1305 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1306 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1307 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1308 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1309
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001310- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1311
1312 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1313 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1314
1315 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1316 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1317 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1318 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1319 supported anyway.
1320
1321 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1322 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1323
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001324- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1325 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1326 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1327 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1328 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001329
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001330- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1331 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1332 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1333
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001334Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001335-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001336
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001337- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1338 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1339 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1340 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1341 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1342 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001343 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1344 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1345 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1346 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001347
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001348- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1349 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1350 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1351
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001352Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001353-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001354
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001355- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1356
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001357Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001358-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001359
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001360- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1361 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1362 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1363 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1364 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1365 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1366
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001367- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1368
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001369- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1370
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001371- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1372
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001373- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1374 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1375 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1376
1377- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1378
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001379Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001380-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001381
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001382- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1383 off a search on Google.
1384
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001385Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001386-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001387
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001388- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1389 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1390 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1391 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1392 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1393 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1394 other platforms should do likewise.
1395
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001396- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1397 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1398 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1399
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001400C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001401-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001402
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001403- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1404 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1405 producing key-value pairs.
1406
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001407- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001408 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001409 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1410 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1411 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1412 previously went unchallenged.
1413
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001414New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001415-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001416
1417Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001418-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001419
1420Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001421-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001422
1423Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001424----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001425
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001426- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1427 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001428
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001429- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1430 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1431 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1432 home.
1433
1434
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001435What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001436===========================
1437
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001438*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1439
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001440Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001441--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001442
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001443- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1444 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001445
1446 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001447 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001448
1449 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1450 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001451 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001452 This needs to be documented.
1453
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001454- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1455 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1456
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001457- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1458 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1459 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1460
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001461- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1462 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1463
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001464- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1465 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1466 class forbids it).
1467
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001468- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1469 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1470 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1471
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001472- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1473
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001474Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001475-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001476
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001477- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1478 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001479 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001480
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001481- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1482 (like 1 + '').
1483
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001484Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001485-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001486
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001487- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1488 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1489 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1490 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001491 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001492 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1493
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001494- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1495 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1496 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1497 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1498
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001499- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1500 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001501 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1502 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1503 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001504
1505- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1506 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001507
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001508- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1509 bytes on its input.
1510
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001511Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001512-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001513
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001514- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001515 convenience function.
1516
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001517- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1518 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1519 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001520 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1521 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1522 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1523 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1524 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1525 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001526
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001527- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1528 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1529 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1530 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1531
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001532- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1533 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1534 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1535
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001536- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1537 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1538 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1539 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1540
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001541- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1542 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001543 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001544 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1545 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1546 new -l and -e options.
1547
1548- statcache is now deprecated.
1549
1550- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1551 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001552 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001553 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1554 time properly taken into account.
1555
1556- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1557 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1558 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1559 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1560
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001561Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001562-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001563
1564Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001565-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001566
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001567- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1568 is built with libdb3 if available.
1569
1570- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1571
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001572C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001573-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001574
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001575- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1576 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1577 PySequence_Size().
1578
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001579- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1580
1581- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1582 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1583 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1584
1585- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1586 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1587
1588- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1589 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1590
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001591New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001592-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001593
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001594- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1595 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1596
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001597- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1598 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1599
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001600- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1601
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001602Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001603-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001604
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001605- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1606 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1607
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001608Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001609-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001610
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001611Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001612----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001613
1614- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1615 removed completely in the next release.
1616
1617- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1618 OSX.
1619
1620- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1621 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1622
1623- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1624
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001625
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001626What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001627===========================
1628
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001629*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1630
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001631Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001632--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001633
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001634- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001635 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001636 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001637 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1638 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001639 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1640 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001641 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1642 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001643
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001644- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1645 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1646
1647- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1648 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1649
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001650Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001651-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001652
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001653- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1654 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1655 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1656 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1657 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1658 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1659 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1660 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1661
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001662- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1663 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1664 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1665 example).
1666
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001667- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001668 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001669 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001670 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001671
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001672- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1673 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1674 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001675 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001676
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001677- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1678 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1679 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1680 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1681 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1682 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1683
1684 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1685
1686 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1687
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001688Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001689-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001690
1691- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1692
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001693- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1694
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001695- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1696 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001697
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001698- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1699 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1700 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1701 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1702 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1703 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001704 attributes.
1705
1706- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1707 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1708 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001709
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001710- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1711 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1712 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001713
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001714- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1715 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1716 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001717 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1718 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1719
1720- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1721 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001722
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001723Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001724-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001725
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001726- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1727 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1728
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001729- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1730 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1731 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1732 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1733
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001734- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1735 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1736 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1737 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1738
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001739 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1740 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1741 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1742 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1743 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1744 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1745 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1746 without losing information).
1747
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001748- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001749 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1750 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1751 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1752 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1753 module).
1754
1755 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1756 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1757 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1758 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1759 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001760
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001761- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001762 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1763 encoding.
1764
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001765- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1766 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1767
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001768- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001769 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1770
1771- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1772 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1773 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1774 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1775
1776- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1777
1778- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1779 ON, and OFF.
1780
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001781- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1782 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1783
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001784Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001785-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001786
1787- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1788 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1789 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001790
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001791- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1792 been added: -X and -E.
1793
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001794Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001795-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001796
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001797- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1798 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1799
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001800C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001801-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001802
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001803- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1804 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1805 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1806 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1807 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1808
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001809- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1810 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1811 as long) arguments.
1812
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001813- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1814 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1815 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1816 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1817 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1818 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1819
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001820- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1821 input.
1822
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001823New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001824-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001825
1826Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001827-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001828
1829Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001830-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001831
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001832- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1833 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1834 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1835
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001836- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1837 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1838 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001839 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001840
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001841 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1842 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1843 import signal
1844 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001845
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001846 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001847 while 1:
1848 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001849 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001850 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1851 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1852 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1853 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001854
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001855
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001856What's New in Python 2.2a4?
1857===========================
1858
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001859*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
1860
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001861Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001862--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001863
1864- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1865 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1866 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1867
1868- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1869 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1870 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1871 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1872 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1873 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1874 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001875
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001876- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001877 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001878 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1879 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1880 associate a docstring with a property.
1881
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001882- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1883 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1884 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1885 other built-in object types.
1886
1887- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1888 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1889 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1890 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1891 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1892
1893- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1894 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1895
1896- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1897 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001898 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001899 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1900 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1901 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1902 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1903 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1904
1905- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1906 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1907 class.
1908
1909- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1910 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1911 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1912 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1913
1914- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1915 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1916 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
1917 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
1918
1919- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
1920 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
1921
1922- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
1923 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
1924 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
1925 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
1926 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001927 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001928 with the same value as s.
1929
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001930- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
1931
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001932Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001933----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001934
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00001935- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
1936
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00001937- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
1938 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
1939 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
1940 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
1941 objects.
1942
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001943- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
1944 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00001945 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
1946 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
1947
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001948- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
1949 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
1950 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
1951
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001952Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001953-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001954
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00001955- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1956 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
1957 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
1958 by the instances.
1959
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00001960- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
1961 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
1962 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
1963
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001964- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
1965 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
1966 before the entire comparison is complete.
1967
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00001968- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1969 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
1970 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
1971
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00001972- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
1973 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
1974 getwriter().
1975
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001976- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
1977 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
1978
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00001979- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001980 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
1981 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
1982
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00001983- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
1984 iterable object.
1985
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001986- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
1987 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001988
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001989- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
1990 authentication.
1991
1992- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
1993 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001994
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001995- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001996 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
1997 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
1998 a sample driver.)
1999
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002000Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002001-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002002
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002003- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2004 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2005 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2006 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2007 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2008 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2009 kernel has large file support.
2010
2011- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2012 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2013 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2014 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2015 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2016
2017- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2018 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2019 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2020
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002021C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002022-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002023
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002024- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2025 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2026
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002027New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002028-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002029
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002030- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2031 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2032
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002033Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002034-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002035
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002036- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2037 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2038 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2039 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2040 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2041
2042- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2043 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2044 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2045 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2046
2047- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2048 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2049
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002050Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002051-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002052
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002053- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002054 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2055 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002056
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002057
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002058What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2059===========================
2060
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002061*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2062
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002063Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002064----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002065
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002066- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2067 big to represent as a C double.
2068
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002069- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2070 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2071 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2072 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2073 restriction).
2074
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002075- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2076 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2077 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2078 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2079 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2080
2081 >>> dir([])
2082 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2083 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2084 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2085 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2086 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2087 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2088 'reverse', 'sort']
2089
2090 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2091
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002092- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002093 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2094 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2095 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2096 OverflowError exception.
2097
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002098- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002099 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002100 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2101 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2102 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2103 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2104 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002105 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002106 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2107 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2108
2109 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2110 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2111 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2112 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002113
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002114- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002115 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2116 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2117 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2118 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2119 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2120 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2121 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2122 once it is created.
2123
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002124- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2125 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2126 (key, value) pairs.
2127
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002128- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002129 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2130 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2131
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002132- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2133 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2134 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2135 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2136 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002137
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002138- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002139 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2140 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2141
2142 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2143
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002144- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002145 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2146
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002147Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002148-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002149
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002150- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002151 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2152 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002153
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002154- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2155 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2156 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2157 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2158 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2159 in this area anymore).
2160
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002161- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2162 threading.Timer.
2163
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002164- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2165 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2166
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002167- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002168 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2169
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002170- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002171 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2172 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2173 converted to Python longs.
2174
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002175- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002176 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2177
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002178- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2179 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2180 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2181
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002182Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002183-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002184
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002185- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2186 division operators as per PEP 238.
2187
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002188Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002189-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002190
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002191- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2192 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2193 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2194 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2195
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002196C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002197-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002198
2199- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002200
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002201- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2202 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002203 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002204
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002205 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2206 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002207 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002208 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002209
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002210- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002211 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2212 module:
2213
2214 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002215
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002216 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2217 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002218
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002219 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2220 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002221
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002222 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2223
2224 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2225
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002226- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002227 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2228 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2229 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002230
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002231New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002232-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002233
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002234- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2235 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2236 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2237 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2238 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002239
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002240Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002241-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002242
2243Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002244-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002245
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002246- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2247 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2248 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2249 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002250 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2251 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2252 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2253 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2254 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002255
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002256- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002257 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2258
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002259
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002260What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2261===========================
2262
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002263*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2264
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002265Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002266-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002267
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002268- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2269 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2270
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002271- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2272 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2273 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002274
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002275- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2276 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2277 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2278 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002279
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002280- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2281
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002282- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002283
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002284Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002285-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002286
2287- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002288 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002289 the module docstring for details.
2290
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002291Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002292-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002293
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002294- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002295 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2296 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2297 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002298
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002299- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2300 Nick Mathewson.
2301
2302Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002303----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002304
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002305- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2306 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2307 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2308 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2309 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2310 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2311 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2312 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2313
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002314- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2315 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2316 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2317 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2318
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002319- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2320 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2321 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2322 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2323 come a long way).
2324
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002325- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2326 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2327 write filters for these warnings).
2328
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002329- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2330 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2331 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2332 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2333 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2334
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002335- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2336 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2337 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2338 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2339 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2340 older distribution.
2341
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002342Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002343-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002344
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002345- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2346 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002347 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002348
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002349- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2350 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2351 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2352
2353- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2354
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002355- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2356
2357- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2358
2359- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2360
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002361- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002362
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002363- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2364
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002365New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002366-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002367
2368C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002369-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002370
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002371- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2372 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2373 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2374 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2375 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2376 against buffer overruns.
2377
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002378- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002379 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2380 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002381 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2382 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2383 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2384
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002385- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2386 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2387 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2388 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2389 deprecated.
2390
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002391Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002392-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002393
2394- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2395 relevant is found.
2396
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002397
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002398What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002399===========================
2400
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002401*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2402
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002403Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002404----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002405
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002406- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2407 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2408 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2409 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2410 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2411 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2412 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2413 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002414 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002415 repaired.
2416
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002417- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002418 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002419 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2420 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2421 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2422 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2423 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2424 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2425 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2426 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2427
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002428- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2429 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2430 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2431 leading BMO character).
2432
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002433- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2434 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2435 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2436
2437 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2438 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2439 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002440
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002441 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2442 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2443 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2444 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2445 for various simple to use conversions.
2446
2447 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2448 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2449
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002450 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2451 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2452 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2453 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2454 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2455 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2456 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2457 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2458 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2459 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2460 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2461 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2462 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2463 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2464 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002465
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002466- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2467 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2468 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002469 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002470 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002471
2472 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002473 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2474 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2475 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2476 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2477 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002478 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2479 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002480
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002481 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2482 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2483 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002484 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002485
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002486- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2487 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2488 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2489 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2490 floating arithmetic,
2491
2492 x = 9007199254740992.0
2493 print long(x)
2494
2495 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2496 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2497 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2498 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2499 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2500 functions are of good quality).
2501
2502 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2503 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2504 algorithms to break.
2505
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002506- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2507 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2508 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2509 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2510 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2511 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2512 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2513 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2514 order.
2515
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002516- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2517 operation along the most common code paths.
2518
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002519- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2520 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2521
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002522- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2523 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2524 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2525 {}.update(UserDict())
2526
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002527- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2528 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2529 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2530 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2531 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2532 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2533 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2534 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2535
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002536- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002537 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002538
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002539 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002540 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2541 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002542 join() method of strings
2543 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002544 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2545 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002546 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002547 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002548
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002549- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2550 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2551
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002552- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2553 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2554
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002555- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2556 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2557 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2558 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2559
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002560- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2561 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002562 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002563 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2564 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002565
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002566- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2567
2568
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002569Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002570-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002571
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002572- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002573 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002574 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2575 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2576
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002577- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2578 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2579
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002580- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2581 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2582 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2583 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2584
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002585- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2586 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2587 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2588
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002589- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2590
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002591- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2592
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002593- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2594 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2595 that are still imported into string.py).
2596
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002597- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2598
2599- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2600 Now it does.
2601
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002602- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2603
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002604- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2605 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2606 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2607 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2608 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002609 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2610 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002611
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002612- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2613 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2614 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2615 'help(object)'.
2616
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002617Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002618-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002619
2620- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002621 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002622 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2623 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2624
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002625- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002626 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2627 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002628
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002629C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002630-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002631
2632- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2633 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002634
2635----
2636
2637**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**