blob: ab04a4072795fef4569693a87d4c000924ce663f [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +000015- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
16 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
17
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +000018- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
19 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
20
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +000021- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
22 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
23 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
24 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
25 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
26 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
27 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
28 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
29 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
30 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
31 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
32 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
33 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +000034
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +000035- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
36 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
37 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
38 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
39 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
40
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +000041- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
42 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
43
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +000044- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
45 It's writable again.
46
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +000047- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
48 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
49 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
50 preferred, then __iter__ can be overriden.
51
Neil Schemenauer4e3363e2003-06-09 18:42:19 +000052- Creating an attribute on a module (i.e. a global variable created by
53 __setattr__) that causes a builtin name to be shadowed now raises a
54 DeprecationWarning. In future versions of Python the effect may be
55 undefined (in order to allow for optimization of global and builtin
56 name lookups).
57
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000058Extension modules
59-----------------
60
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +000061- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
62 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
63 unique within a single program run.
64
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +000065- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
66 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
67
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +000068- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
69 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
70
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +000071- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
72 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +000073
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +000074- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
75
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +000076- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
77 Fixes SF bug #730685.
78
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +000079- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
80 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
81 for many BSD-derived systems.
82
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +000083Library
84-------
85
Raymond Hettinger6f3eaa62003-06-27 21:43:39 +000086- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
87 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
88
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +000089- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
90 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
91 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
92 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
93 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
94 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
95 argument.
96
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +000097- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
98 569574).
99
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000100- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
101 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
102 no more.
103
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000104- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
105 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
106 module. A function registered with the threading module will
107 be used for all threads it creates.
108
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000109- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
110 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
111 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000112 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000113
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000114- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
115
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000116- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
117 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
118 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
119 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
120
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000121- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
122 handling.
123
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000124- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
125 __doc__ of data descriptors.
126
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000127- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
128 in socket.py.
129
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000130- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
131
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000132- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
133 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
134 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
135 opener with proxy support.
136
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000137Tools/Demos
138-----------
139
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000140- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
141
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000142- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
143
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000144- diff.py is a new script for print file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff
145 formats. Provides an alternate command line interface to difflib.py.
146
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000147- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
148 files.
149
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000150Build
151-----
152
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000153- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows to specify a
154 different root directory.
155
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000156C API
157-----
158
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000159- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
160 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
161 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
162 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
163 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
164 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
165 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
166 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
167 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
168 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
169
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000170New platforms
171-------------
172
173None this time.
174
175Tests
176-----
177
178- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
179 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
180
181Windows
182-------
183
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000184- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
185
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000186- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
187 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
188 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
189 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
190 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
191 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
192 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
193 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
194 that's what it's for.
195
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000196Mac
197---
198
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000199- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
200 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
201 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
202 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000203- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
204 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
205- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000206
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000207What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
208================================
209
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000210*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000211
212Core and builtins
213-----------------
214
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000215- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
216 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
217
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000218- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
219 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
220 and cannot be strings).
221
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000222- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
223 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
224 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
225 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
226
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000227- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
228 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
229 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
230 Python itself.
231
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000232- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
233 the referenced object, if it has one.
234
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000235- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
236 the thread started at
237 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
238
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000239- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
240 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
241 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
242 placed on a list index.
243
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000244- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
245 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
246 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
247 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
248
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000249- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
250 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
251 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
252 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
253 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
254 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
255 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
256
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000257- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
258 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
259 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
260 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
261 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
262
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000263- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
264 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000265
266- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
267 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
268 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
269 #693195.)
270
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000271- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
272 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000273
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000274- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000275 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000276 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
277 interpreter executions, would fail.
278
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000279- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000280 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000281 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000282
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000283Extension modules
284-----------------
285
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000286- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
287 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
288 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
289 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
290
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000291- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
292 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
293
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000294- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
295 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
296 and Greg Chapman.)
297
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000298- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
299 recursively.
300
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000301- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000302 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
303 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
304 leaks.
305
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000306- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
307
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000308- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
309 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
310 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
311 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
312 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
313 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
314 #705836.
315
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000316- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
317 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
318
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000319- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
320 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
321 See SF bug #692416.
322
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +0000323- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
324 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
325
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +0000326- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
327 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
328 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000329
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000330- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +0000331 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
332 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
333
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +0000334- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
335 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
336 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
337 timeouts to work properly.
338
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000339Library
340-------
341
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +0000342- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
343 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
344 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
345 future release.
346
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +0000347- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
348 for querying platform dependent features.
349
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +0000350- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +0000351
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +0000352- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
353 pickle protocol versions.
354
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +0000355- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
356 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
357 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
358
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +0000359- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
360
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +0000361- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
362 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
363 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
364 modules.
365
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +0000366- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
367 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
368 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
369
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000370- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
371 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
372
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +0000373- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
374 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
375 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
376
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000377- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +0000378 MS Office extensions.
379
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +0000380- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
381 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
382
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +0000383- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
384 execution speed of expressions and statements.
385
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000386- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
387 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
388 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
389 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
390 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
391 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
392
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000393- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
394 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
395 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000396
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +0000397- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
398 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
399 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
400
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000401- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
402
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +0000403- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
404 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
405 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
406
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000407Tools/Demos
408-----------
409
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +0000410- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
411 See the module docstring for details.
412
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000413Build
414-----
415
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000416- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
417 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000418
419C API
420-----
421
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000422- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
423
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +0000424- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
425 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
426 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
427
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000428- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
429 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000430
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +0000431 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
432 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
433 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000434
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000435- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000436 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
437
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000438- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
439 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
440 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000441
442New platforms
443-------------
444
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +0000445None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000446
447Tests
448-----
449
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000450- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
451 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000452
453Windows
454-------
455
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +0000456- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
457 function.
458
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +0000459- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
460 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000461
462Mac
463---
464
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000465- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
466 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000467
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000468- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
469 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000470
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000471- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
472 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
473 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000474
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000475- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +0000476 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
477 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000478
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000479- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
480 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000481
482
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000483What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
484=================================
485
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000486*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000487
488Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000489-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000490
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000491- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
492 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
493 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
494
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000495- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
496 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
497 (SF patch #664376.)
498
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000499- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
500 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
501 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
502 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
503 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
504 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000505 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000506
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000507- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
508 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
509 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
510 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000511 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000512
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000513- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
514 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
515 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
516 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
517 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
518 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
519 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
520 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
521 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
522 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
523 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
524
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000525- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
526 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
527 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
528 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
529 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
530 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
531
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000532- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
533 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
534
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000535- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
536 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
537 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
538 case.)
539
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000540- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
541 passed as unicode strings.
542
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000543- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
544 See SF bug #683467.
545
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000546- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
547 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
548
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000549- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
550
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000551- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
552
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000553- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
554 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
555 arguments.
556
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000557- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
558 See SF bug #667147.
559
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000560- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000561 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000562 See SF bug #676155.
563
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000564- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000565 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000566 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
567 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
568 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
569 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
570 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
571 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000572
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000573Extension modules
574-----------------
575
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000576- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
577 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
578 tp_as_number pointer.
579
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000580- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
581 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
582 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
583 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
584 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
585
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000586- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
587
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000588- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
589
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000590- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000591 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000592 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
593 patch #678531.)
594
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000595- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
596 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
597
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000598- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
599 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
600
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000601- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
602
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000603- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
604 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
605 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
606
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000607- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
608
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000609- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
610 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
611
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000612- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000613
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000614- datetime changes:
615
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +0000616 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
617
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000618 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
619 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
620 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
621 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
622 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
623 now.
624
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000625 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000626 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
627 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000628
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000629 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000630 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000631 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
632 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
633 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
634 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000635
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000636 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
637 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
638 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000639 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
640
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000641 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
642 by a later example coded by Guido.
643
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000644 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000645 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
646 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
647 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000648 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
649 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
650
651 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
652 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
653 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
654 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
655 tzinfo subclass instance.
656
657 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
658 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
659 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
660 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
661 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
662 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
663 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
664 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000665
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000666 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
667 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
668 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
669 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
670 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000671 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
672
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000673 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000674
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000675 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
676 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
677 as a naive datetime object.
678
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000679 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
680 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
681 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
682
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000683 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
684 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
685 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
686 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
687 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
688 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
689 comparison.
690
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000691 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
692 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
693 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
694 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000695 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000696
697 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000698
699 and ::
700
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000701 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
702
703 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
704 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
705 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
706 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
707
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000708 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
709 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
710 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
711 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
712 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
713
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000714 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
715 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000716 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
717 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000718
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000719Library
720-------
721
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000722- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
723 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
724
725- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
726 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
727 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
728 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
729 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
730 See PEP 307 for details.
731
732- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
733 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
734
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000735- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
736 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000737 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000738 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
739 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000740 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000741
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000742- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
743 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
744
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000745- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
746 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
747 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
748
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000749- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
750
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000751- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
752 exception.
753
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000754- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
755 class.
756
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000757- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
758 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
759 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
760
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000761- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
762 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
763
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000764- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000765 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
766 See SF bug #659228.
767
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000768- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
769 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
770 See SF patch #651082.
771
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000772- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000773
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000774- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
775 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
776
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000777- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000778 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000779
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000780- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
781 DOS paths from other platforms.
782
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000783Tools/Demos
784-----------
785
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000786- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
787 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
788 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
789 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
790 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
791 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
792 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
793 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
794 example:
795
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000796 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
797 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000798
799 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
800
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000801
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000802Build
803-----
804
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000805- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
806 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
807 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000808 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
809
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000810 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
811
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000812- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
813 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
814 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
815 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
816 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
817 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
818 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
819 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
820 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
821
822- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
823 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
824 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
825 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
826
827- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
828 from the Tools/scripts directory.
829
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000830C API
831-----
832
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000833- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
834 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000835
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000836- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
837 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
838 tp_as_number pointer.
839
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000840- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
841 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
842 (SF #681367)
843
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000844- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
845 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
846 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
847 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000848
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000849Tests
850-----
851
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000852- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000853 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
854 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
855 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
856 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
857 pydoc.)
858
859- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
860
861- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000862
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000863Windows
864-------
865
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000866- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
867 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
868 time).
869
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000870- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
871 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
872
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000873- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
874 release without strong cryptography.
875
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000876- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000877 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000878
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000879- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
880 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
881
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000882Mac
883---
884
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000885- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
886 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000887
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000888- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
889 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
890 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000891
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000892- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
893 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000894
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000895- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
896 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
897 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
898 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000899
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000900- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000901 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
902 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
903 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000904
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000905
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000906What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000907=================================
908
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000909*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000910
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000911Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000912--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000913
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000914- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
915
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000916- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
917 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000918 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000919 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000920 a different meaning than before.
921
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000922- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000923 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000924 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000925
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000926- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000927 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000928 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000929
930- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
931 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
932 and deallocation.
933
934- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
935 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
936
937- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
938 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
939 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
940 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
941 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
942
943- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
944 now detected by the garbage collector.
945
946- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
947 [SF bug 519621]
948
949- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
950 identifier.
951
952- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
953 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
954 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
955 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
956 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
957 [SF bug 563060]
958
959- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
960 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
961 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
962 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
963 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
964
965- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
966 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
967 not called. [SF bug #537450]
968
969- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
970
971- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
972 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
973 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
974 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
975 state of the slots would be lost.)
976
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000977Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000978-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000979
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000980- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000981 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
982 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
983 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
984 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000985 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
986 Jython 2.1.
987
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000988- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000989 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000990 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
991 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
992 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
993 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
994 these, see PEP 302.
995
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000996- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
997 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
998 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
999
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001000- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1001 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1002 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1003
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001004- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1005 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1006 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1007
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001008- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1009 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1010 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1011 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1012 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1013 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1014 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1015 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1016 releases or implementations.
1017
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001018- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001019 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1020 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001021
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001022- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1023 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1024
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001025- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1026 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1027 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1028
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001029- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1030 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1031
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001032- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1033 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001034 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1035 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001036
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001037- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1038 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1039 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1040 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1041 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1042
1043 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1044 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1045 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1046 pattern.
1047
1048 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1049 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1050 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1051 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1052
1053 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1054 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1055 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1056 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1057 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1058 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1059
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001060- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1061 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1062 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1063 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1064 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1065 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1066 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1067 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001068
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001069- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1070 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1071 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1072 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1073 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001074 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1075 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1076 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1077 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1078 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1079 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1080 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001081
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001082- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1083 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1084
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001085- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1086 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1087 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1088 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1089 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1090 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1091 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1092 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1093 to Zack Weinberg!
1094
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001095- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1096 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1097 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1098 type. This has been fixed now.
1099
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001100- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1101 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1102 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1103
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001104- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1105 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1106 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1107 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1108 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1109 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1110 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1111 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001112 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001113
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001114- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1115 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1116 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001117
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001118- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1119 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1120 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1121 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1122 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1123 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1124 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1125 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001126 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001127 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1128 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1129
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001130- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1131 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1132 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1133 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1134 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1135 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1136 this.)
1137
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001138- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1139 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001140 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001141 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001142 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1143 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001144 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1145 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001146
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001147- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1148 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1149 currently running.
1150
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001151- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1152 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1153 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1154 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1155
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001156- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1157 as directory names.
1158
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001159- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1160 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1161
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001162- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1163 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1164
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001165- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001166 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1167 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001168
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001169- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1170 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1171 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1172 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1173 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1174
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001175- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1176 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1177 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1178 removed.
1179
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001180- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1181 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1182 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1183
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001184- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1185 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1186 to __debug__.
1187
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001188- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1189 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1190 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1191
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001192- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1193 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1194 deprecated now.
1195
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001196- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1197 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1198 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001199
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001200- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1201 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1202 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1203 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1204 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001205
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001206- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1207 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1208
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001209- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1210 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1211 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001212 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001213 is backward compatible.
1214
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001215- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1216 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1217 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1218 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1219 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1220
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001221- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1222 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1223 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1224 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1225 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1226 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001227
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001228- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1229 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1230
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001231- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1232 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1233
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001234- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1235 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1236 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1237 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1238 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1239
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001240- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1241 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1242 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1243
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001244- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001245 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1246
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001247- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1248 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1249 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001250
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001251- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1252 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1253
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001254- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1255 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1256 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1257
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001258- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1259
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001260Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001261-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001262
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001263- Added three operators to the operator module:
1264 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1265 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1266 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1267
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001268- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1269
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001270- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1271 archives.
1272
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001273- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1274 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1275 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1276
1277 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1278
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001279- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1280 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1281 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001282 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001283
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001284- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1285 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1286 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1287 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001288 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1289 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1290 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1291 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001292
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001293- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1294 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001295
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001296- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1297
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001298- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1299 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1300
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001301- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1302 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1303 supported.
1304
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001305- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1306
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001307- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1308 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001309
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001310- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1311 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1312
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001313- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1314
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001315- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1316 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1317
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001318- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1319 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1320 functions but callable type objects.
1321
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001322- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001323 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001324 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001325
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001326- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1327 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001328
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001329- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1330 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001331
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001332- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1333 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1334 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1335 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1336
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001337- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1338 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001339
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001340- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1341 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1342 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1343 and __imul__.
1344
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001345- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001346 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1347 is called.
1348
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001349- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1350 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1351 interpreter was compiled.
1352
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001353- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1354 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1355 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001356 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001357 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1358 1, not 2.
1359
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001360- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1361 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1362 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1363 limit.
1364
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001365- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1366 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1367 bug #623464.
1368
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001369- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1370 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1371 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1372 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1373
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001374Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001375-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001376
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001377- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1378
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001379- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1380 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1381 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1382 with Python 2.3a2.
1383
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001384- os.path exposes getctime.
1385
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001386- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001387 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001388 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001389 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001390 unit tests of floating point results.
1391
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001392- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1393 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1394 has been increased.
1395
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001396- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1397 executed.
1398
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001399- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1400 postinstallation script.
1401
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001402- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1403 test the current module.
1404
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001405- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001406 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1407 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1408 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1409 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1410
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001411- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001412 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001413 Ward's Optik package.
1414
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001415- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1416 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1417 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1418 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1419
1420- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1421 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001422 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001423
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001424- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1425 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1426 shelf are binary pickles.
1427
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001428- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1429 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1430
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001431- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1432 modules are iterators now.
1433
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001434- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1435 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1436 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1437 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1438 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1439 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001440
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001441- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1442 with their entity value.
1443
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001444- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1445
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001446- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1447 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001448
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001449- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1450 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001451 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001452
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001453- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1454 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1455 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1456 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1457 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1458 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1459 main():
1460
1461 import locale
1462 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1463
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001464- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1465 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1466
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001467- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1468 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1469 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1470 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1471 to the new standard.
1472
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001473- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1474 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1475 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1476 an extension to the database.
1477
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001478- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1479 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1480 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1481 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001482 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001483
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001484- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001485 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001486
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001487- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1488 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1489 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1490 bounded integers.
1491
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001492- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1493 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1494 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1495 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1496 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1497 in existence.
1498
1499 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1500 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1501 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1502 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1503 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1504 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1505
1506 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1507 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1508 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1509 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1510
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001511- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1512 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1513 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1514
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001515- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1516
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001517- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1518 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1519 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1520 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1521
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001522- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1523 argument.
1524
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001525- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1526 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1527 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1528 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1529 [SF patch 560794].
1530
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001531- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1532 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1533 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001534 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1535 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1536 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001537
1538- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1539 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001540
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001541- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1542 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1543 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1544 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001545
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001546- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1547 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1548 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1549 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1550 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1551
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001552- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001553
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001554- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1555
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001556- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1557 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1558 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1559 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1560 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1561 identical to None.
1562
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001563- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1564 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1565 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1566 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1567 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1568 results now.
1569
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001570- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1571 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1572
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001573- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1574 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1575 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1576 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1577 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1578 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1579 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1580 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1581
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001582- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1583
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001584- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1585 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1586
1587- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1588 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1589 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1590 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1591 and other systems.
1592
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001593- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1594 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1595 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1596 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 +00001597 work well with these.
1598
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001599- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1600
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001601- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001602 connections.
1603
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001604- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1605 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1606 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1607
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001608- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1609 sets
1610
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001611- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1612 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1613 name.
1614
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001615- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1616 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1617 passed in.
1618
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001619- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001620 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001621 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1622 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001623
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001624- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1625
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001626- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1627
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001628- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1629 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1630 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1631
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001632- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1633 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1634 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1635 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001636 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001637
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001638- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001639 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001640 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001641
1642- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1643 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1644 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1645
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001646- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001647 the value of its expression argument.
1648
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001649- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1650 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1651 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1652
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001653- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1654 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1655 skipstone browser was included.
1656
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001657- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1658 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1659
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001660Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001661-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001662
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001663- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1664 names in addition to accepting file names.
1665
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001666- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1667 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1668 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1669 still used and useful.)
1670
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001671- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1672 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1673 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1674 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001675
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001676- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1677 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1678 the generated binary.
1679
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001680Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001681-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001682
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001683- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1684
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001685- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1686 except in the hands of experts.
1687
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001688- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001689 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1690 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1691 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001692
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001693- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1694 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1695 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1696 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1697 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1698 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1699 builds.
1700
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001701- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1702 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1703 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1704 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1705 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1706 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1707 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1708 new type.
1709
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001710- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001711
1712 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1713 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1714 positive infinities.
1715
1716 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1717 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1718 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1719 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1720 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1721 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1722 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1723
1724 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1725
1726 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1727
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001728- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1729 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1730 size of the executable.
1731
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001732- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1733 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1734 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1735 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001736
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001737- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1738
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001739- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1740 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1741 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001742
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001743- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1744 well as Unix.
1745
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001746- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1747 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1748 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1749 modules in the README file for details.
1750
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001751C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001752-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001753
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001754- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1755 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001756 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001757 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001758 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001759
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001760- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1761 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1762 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1763 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1764 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1765 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001766 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001767 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1768 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1769 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1770 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1771 aligned.)
1772
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001773- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1774 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1775 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1776
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001777- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1778 level.
1779
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001780- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1781 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1782 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1783 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1784 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1785
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001786- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1787 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1788 code.
1789
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001790- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1791 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1792 adjusting for negative indices.
1793
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001794- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1795 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1796 object.
1797
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001798- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1799 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1800 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1801
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001802- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1803 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001804
1805- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1806
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001807- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1808 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1809 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1810 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1811
1812- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1813
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001814- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001815
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001816- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001817 without going through the buffer API.
1818
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001819- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001820
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001821- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1822 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1823 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1824 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1825
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001826- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1827 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1828
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001829- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001830 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1831
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001832New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001833-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001834
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001835- OpenVMS is now supported.
1836
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001837- AtheOS is now supported.
1838
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001839- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1840
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001841- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1842
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001843Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001844-----
1845
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001846- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1847 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1848 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001849
1850Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001851-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001852
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001853- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1854 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1855 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1856 bugs.
1857 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001858 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001859 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1860 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001861 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001862
1863- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001864 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001865
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001866- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1867 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1868
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001869- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1870 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001871 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001872 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1873
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001874- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1875 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1876 use files" uninstall option).
1877
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001878- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1879
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001880- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1881 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1882
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001883- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1884 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1885 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1886
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001887- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1888 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1889 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1890 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1891 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001892 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1893 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1894 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001895
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001896- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001897 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001898 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1899 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1900 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1901 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1902 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1903 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1904 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1905 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1906 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1907 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1908 work around.
1909
1910- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1911 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1912 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1913 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1914 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1915 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1916 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1917 specified with O_CREAT too).
1918
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001919Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001920----
1921
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001922- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001923
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001924- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1925 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1926 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1927
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001928- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1929 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1930 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1931
1932- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1933 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1934 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1935 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1936 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1937 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1938 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1939 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001940
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001941- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1942 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1943 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001944
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001945- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1946 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1947 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1948 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1949 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001950
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001951- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1952 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1953 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001954
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001955- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1956 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001957
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001958- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1959 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1960 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1961 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1962 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001963
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001964- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1965 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1966 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1967
1968- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1969 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1970 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001971
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001972- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1973 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1974 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1975 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001976 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001977
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001978- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1979 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001980
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001981- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1982 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001983
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001984- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001985 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001986 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1987 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001988
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001989
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001990What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001991===============================
1992
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001993*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1994
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001995Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001996--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001997
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001998- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1999 with a custom metaclass.
2000
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002001Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002002-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002003
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002004- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2005 are proxies.
2006
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002007Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002008-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002009
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002010- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2011 very short strings.
2012
2013- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2014 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2015 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2016 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2017 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2018
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002019Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002020-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002021
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002022- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2023 close or delete time).
2024
2025- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2026 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2027
2028- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2029
2030- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002031 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002032
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002033Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002034-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002035
2036Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002037-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002038
2039C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002040-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002041
2042New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002043-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002044
2045Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002046-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002047
2048Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002049-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002050
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002051- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2052
2053- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2054 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2055
2056- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2057 deleted at process exit time.
2058
2059- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2060 in backslash.
2061
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002062Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002063----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002064
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002065- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2066 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2067 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2068
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002069
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002070What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002071===========================
2072
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002073*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2074
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002075Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002076--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002077
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002078- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2079 been extensively updated. See
2080
2081 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2082
2083 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2084
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002085- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2086 deleted!
2087
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002088- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2089 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2090 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2091 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2092 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2093
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002094- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2095
2096 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2097 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2098
2099 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2100 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2101 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2102 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2103 supported anyway.
2104
2105 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2106 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2107
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002108- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2109 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2110 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2111 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2112 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002113
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002114- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2115 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2116 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2117
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002118Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002119-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002120
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002121- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2122 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2123 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2124 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2125 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2126 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002127 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2128 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2129 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2130 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002131
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002132- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2133 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2134 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2135
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002136Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002137-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002138
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002139- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2140
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002141Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002142-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002143
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002144- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2145 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2146 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2147 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2148 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2149 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2150
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002151- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2152
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002153- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2154
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002155- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2156
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002157- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2158 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2159 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2160
2161- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2162
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002163Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002164-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002165
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002166- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2167 off a search on Google.
2168
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002169Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002170-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002171
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002172- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2173 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2174 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2175 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2176 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2177 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2178 other platforms should do likewise.
2179
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002180- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2181 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2182 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2183
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002184C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002185-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002186
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002187- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2188 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2189 producing key-value pairs.
2190
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002191- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002192 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002193 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2194 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2195 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2196 previously went unchallenged.
2197
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002198New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002199-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002200
2201Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002202-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002203
2204Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002205-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002206
2207Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002208----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002209
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002210- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2211 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002212
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002213- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2214 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2215 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2216 home.
2217
2218
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002219What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002220===========================
2221
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002222*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2223
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002224Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002225--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002226
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002227- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2228 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002229
2230 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002231 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002232
2233 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2234 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002235 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002236 This needs to be documented.
2237
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002238- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2239 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2240
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002241- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2242 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2243 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2244
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002245- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2246 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2247
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002248- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2249 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2250 class forbids it).
2251
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002252- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2253 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2254 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2255
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002256- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2257
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002258Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002259-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002260
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002261- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2262 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002263 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002264
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002265- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2266 (like 1 + '').
2267
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002268Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002269-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002270
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002271- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2272 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2273 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2274 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002275 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002276 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2277
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002278- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2279 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2280 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2281 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2282
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002283- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2284 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002285 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2286 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2287 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002288
2289- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2290 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002291
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002292- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2293 bytes on its input.
2294
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002295Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002296-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002297
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002298- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002299 convenience function.
2300
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002301- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2302 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2303 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002304 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2305 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2306 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2307 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2308 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2309 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002310
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002311- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2312 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2313 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2314 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2315
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002316- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2317 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2318 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2319
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002320- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2321 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
2322 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
2323 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2324
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002325- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2326 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002327 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002328 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2329 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2330 new -l and -e options.
2331
2332- statcache is now deprecated.
2333
2334- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2335 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002336 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002337 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2338 time properly taken into account.
2339
2340- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2341 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2342 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2343 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2344
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002345Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002346-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002347
2348Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002349-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002350
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002351- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2352 is built with libdb3 if available.
2353
2354- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2355
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002356C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002357-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002358
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002359- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2360 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2361 PySequence_Size().
2362
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002363- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2364
2365- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2366 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2367 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2368
2369- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2370 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2371
2372- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2373 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2374
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002375New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002376-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002377
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002378- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2379 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2380
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002381- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2382 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2383
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002384- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2385
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002386Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002387-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002388
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002389- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2390 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2391
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002392Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002393-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002394
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002395Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002396----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002397
2398- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2399 removed completely in the next release.
2400
2401- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2402 OSX.
2403
2404- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2405 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2406
2407- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2408
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002409
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002410What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002411===========================
2412
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002413*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2414
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002415Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002416--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002417
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002418- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002419 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002420 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002421 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2422 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002423 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2424 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002425 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2426 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002427
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002428- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2429 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2430
2431- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2432 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2433
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002434Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002435-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002436
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002437- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2438 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2439 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2440 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2441 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2442 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2443 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2444 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2445
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002446- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2447 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2448 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2449 example).
2450
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002451- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002452 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002453 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002454 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002455
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002456- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2457 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2458 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002459 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002460
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002461- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2462 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2463 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2464 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2465 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2466 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2467
2468 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2469
2470 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2471
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002472Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002473-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002474
2475- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2476
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002477- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2478
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002479- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2480 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002481
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002482- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2483 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2484 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2485 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2486 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2487 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002488 attributes.
2489
2490- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2491 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2492 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002493
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002494- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2495 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2496 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002497
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002498- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2499 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2500 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002501 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2502 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2503
2504- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2505 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002506
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002507Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002508-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002509
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002510- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2511 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2512
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002513- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2514 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2515 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2516 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2517
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002518- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2519 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2520 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2521 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2522
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002523 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2524 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2525 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2526 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2527 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2528 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2529 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2530 without losing information).
2531
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002532- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002533 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2534 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2535 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2536 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2537 module).
2538
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002539 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002540 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2541 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2542 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2543 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002544
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002545- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002546 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2547 encoding.
2548
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002549- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2550 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2551
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002552- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002553 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2554
2555- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2556 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2557 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2558 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2559
2560- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2561
2562- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2563 ON, and OFF.
2564
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002565- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2566 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2567
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002568Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002569-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002570
2571- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2572 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2573 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002574
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002575- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2576 been added: -X and -E.
2577
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002578Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002579-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002580
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002581- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2582 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2583
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002584C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002585-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002586
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002587- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2588 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2589 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2590 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2591 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2592
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002593- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2594 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2595 as long) arguments.
2596
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002597- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2598 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2599 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2600 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2601 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2602 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2603
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002604- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2605 input.
2606
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002607New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002608-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002609
2610Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002611-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002612
2613Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002614-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002615
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002616- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2617 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2618 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2619
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002620- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2621 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2622 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002623 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002624
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002625 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2626 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2627 import signal
2628 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002629
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002630 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002631 while 1:
2632 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002633 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002634 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2635 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2636 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2637 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002638
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002639
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002640What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2641===========================
2642
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002643*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2644
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002645Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002646--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002647
2648- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2649 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2650 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2651
2652- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2653 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2654 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2655 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2656 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2657 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2658 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002659
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002660- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002661 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002662 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2663 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2664 associate a docstring with a property.
2665
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002666- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2667 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2668 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2669 other built-in object types.
2670
2671- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2672 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2673 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2674 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2675 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2676
2677- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2678 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2679
2680- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2681 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002682 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002683 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2684 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2685 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2686 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2687 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2688
2689- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2690 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2691 class.
2692
2693- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2694 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2695 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2696 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2697
2698- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2699 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2700 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2701 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2702
2703- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2704 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2705
2706- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2707 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2708 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2709 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2710 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002711 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002712 with the same value as s.
2713
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002714- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2715
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002716Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002717----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002718
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002719- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2720
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002721- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2722 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2723 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2724 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2725 objects.
2726
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002727- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2728 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002729 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2730 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2731
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002732- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2733 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2734 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2735
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002736Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002737-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002738
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002739- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2740 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2741 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2742 by the instances.
2743
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002744- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2745 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2746 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2747
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002748- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2749 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2750 before the entire comparison is complete.
2751
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002752- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2753 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2754 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2755
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002756- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2757 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2758 getwriter().
2759
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002760- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2761 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2762
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002763- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002764 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2765 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2766
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002767- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2768 iterable object.
2769
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002770- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2771 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002772
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002773- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2774 authentication.
2775
2776- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2777 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002778
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002779- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002780 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2781 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2782 a sample driver.)
2783
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002784Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002785-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002786
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002787- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2788 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2789 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2790 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2791 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2792 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2793 kernel has large file support.
2794
2795- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2796 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2797 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2798 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2799 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2800
2801- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2802 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2803 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2804
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002805C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002806-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002807
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002808- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2809 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2810
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002811New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002812-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002813
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002814- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2815 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2816
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002817Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002818-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002819
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002820- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2821 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2822 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2823 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2824 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2825
2826- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2827 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2828 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2829 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2830
2831- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2832 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2833
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002834Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002835-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002836
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002837- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002838 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2839 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002840
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002841
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002842What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2843===========================
2844
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002845*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2846
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002847Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002848----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002849
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002850- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2851 big to represent as a C double.
2852
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002853- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2854 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2855 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2856 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2857 restriction).
2858
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002859- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2860 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2861 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2862 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2863 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2864
2865 >>> dir([])
2866 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2867 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2868 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2869 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2870 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2871 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2872 'reverse', 'sort']
2873
2874 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2875
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002876- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002877 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2878 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2879 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2880 OverflowError exception.
2881
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002882- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002883 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002884 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2885 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2886 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2887 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2888 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002889 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002890 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2891 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2892
2893 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2894 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2895 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2896 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002897
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002898- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002899 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2900 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2901 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2902 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2903 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2904 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2905 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2906 once it is created.
2907
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002908- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2909 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2910 (key, value) pairs.
2911
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002912- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002913 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2914 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2915
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002916- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2917 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2918 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2919 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2920 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002921
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002922- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002923 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2924 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2925
2926 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2927
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002928- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002929 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2930
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002931Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002932-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002933
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002934- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002935 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2936 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002937
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002938- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2939 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2940 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2941 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2942 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2943 in this area anymore).
2944
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002945- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2946 threading.Timer.
2947
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002948- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2949 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2950
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002951- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002952 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2953
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002954- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002955 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2956 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2957 converted to Python longs.
2958
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002959- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002960 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2961
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002962- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2963 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2964 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2965
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002966Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002967-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002968
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002969- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2970 division operators as per PEP 238.
2971
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002972Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002973-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002974
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002975- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2976 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2977 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2978 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2979
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002980C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002981-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002982
2983- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002984
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002985- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2986 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002987 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002988
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002989 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2990 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002991 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002992 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002993
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002994- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002995 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2996 module:
2997
2998 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002999
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003000 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3001 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003002
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003003 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3004 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003005
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003006 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3007
3008 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3009
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003010- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003011 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3012 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3013 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003014
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003015New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003016-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003017
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003018- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3019 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3020 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3021 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3022 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003023
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003024Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003025-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003026
3027Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003028-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003029
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003030- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3031 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3032 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3033 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003034 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3035 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3036 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3037 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3038 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003039
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003040- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003041 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3042
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003043
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003044What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3045===========================
3046
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003047*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3048
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003049Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003050-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003051
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003052- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3053 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3054
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003055- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3056 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3057 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003058
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003059- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3060 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3061 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3062 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003063
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003064- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3065
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003066- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003067
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003068Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003069-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003070
3071- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003072 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003073 the module docstring for details.
3074
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003075Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003076-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003077
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003078- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003079 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3080 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3081 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003082
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003083- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3084 Nick Mathewson.
3085
3086Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003087----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003088
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003089- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3090 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3091 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3092 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3093 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3094 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3095 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3096 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3097
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003098- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3099 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3100 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3101 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3102
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003103- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3104 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3105 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3106 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3107 come a long way).
3108
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003109- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3110 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3111 write filters for these warnings).
3112
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003113- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3114 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3115 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3116 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3117 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3118
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003119- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3120 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3121 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3122 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3123 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3124 older distribution.
3125
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003126Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003127-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003128
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003129- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3130 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003131 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003132
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003133- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3134 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3135 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3136
3137- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3138
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003139- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3140
3141- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3142
3143- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3144
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003145- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003146
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003147- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3148
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003149New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003150-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003151
3152C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003153-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003154
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003155- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3156 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3157 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3158 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3159 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3160 against buffer overruns.
3161
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003162- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003163 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3164 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003165 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3166 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3167 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3168
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003169- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3170 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3171 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3172 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3173 deprecated.
3174
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003175Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003176-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003177
3178- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3179 relevant is found.
3180
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003181
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003182What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003183===========================
3184
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003185*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3186
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003187Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003188----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003189
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003190- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3191 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3192 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3193 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3194 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3195 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3196 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3197 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003198 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003199 repaired.
3200
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003201- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003202 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003203 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3204 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3205 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3206 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3207 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3208 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3209 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3210 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3211
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003212- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3213 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3214 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3215 leading BMO character).
3216
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003217- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3218 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3219 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3220
3221 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3222 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3223 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003224
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003225 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3226 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3227 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3228 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3229 for various simple to use conversions.
3230
3231 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3232 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3233
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003234 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3235 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3236 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3237 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3238 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3239 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3240 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3241 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3242 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3243 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3244 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3245 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3246 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3247 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3248 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003249
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003250- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3251 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3252 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003253 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003254 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003255
3256 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003257 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3258 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3259 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3260 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3261 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003262 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3263 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003264
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003265 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3266 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3267 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003268 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003269
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003270- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3271 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3272 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3273 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3274 floating arithmetic,
3275
3276 x = 9007199254740992.0
3277 print long(x)
3278
3279 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3280 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3281 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3282 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3283 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3284 functions are of good quality).
3285
3286 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3287 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3288 algorithms to break.
3289
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003290- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3291 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3292 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3293 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3294 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3295 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3296 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3297 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3298 order.
3299
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003300- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3301 operation along the most common code paths.
3302
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003303- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3304 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3305
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003306- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3307 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3308 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3309 {}.update(UserDict())
3310
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003311- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3312 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3313 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3314 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3315 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3316 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3317 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3318 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3319
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003320- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003321 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003322
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003323 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003324 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3325 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003326 join() method of strings
3327 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003328 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3329 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003330 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003331 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003332
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003333- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3334 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3335
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003336- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3337 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3338
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003339- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3340 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3341 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3342 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3343
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003344- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3345 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003346 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003347 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3348 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003349
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003350- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3351
3352
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003353Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003354-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003355
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003356- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003357 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003358 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3359 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3360
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003361- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3362 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3363
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003364- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3365 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3366 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3367 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3368
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003369- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3370 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3371 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3372
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003373- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3374
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003375- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3376
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003377- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3378 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3379 that are still imported into string.py).
3380
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003381- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3382
3383- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3384 Now it does.
3385
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003386- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3387
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003388- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3389 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3390 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3391 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3392 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003393 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3394 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003395
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003396- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3397 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3398 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3399 'help(object)'.
3400
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003401Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003402-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003403
3404- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003405 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003406 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3407 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3408
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003409- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003410 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3411 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003412
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003413C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003414-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003415
3416- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3417 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003418
3419----
3420
3421**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**