blob: c78fa69eca74243f2161ace3919bffb6f0d44bc8 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Neal Norwitz708e51a2005-10-03 04:48:15 +000015- SF Bug #976608: fix SystemError when mtime of an imported file is -1.
16
Neal Norwitz11bd1192005-10-03 00:54:56 +000017- SF Bug #887946: fix segfault when redirecting stdin from a directory.
18 Provide a warning when a directory is passed on the command line.
19
Neal Norwitz40d37812005-10-02 01:48:49 +000020- Fix segfault with invalid coding.
21
22- SF bug #772896: unknown encoding results in MemoryError.
23
Raymond Hettinger6b27cda2005-09-24 21:23:05 +000024- All iterators now have a Boolean value of true. Formerly, some iterators
25 supported a __len__() method which evaluated to False when the iterator
26 was empty.
27
Guido van Rossum630db602005-09-20 18:49:54 +000028- On 64-bit platforms, when __len__() returns a value that cannot be
29 represented as a C int, raise OverflowError.
30
Skip Montanarof8948ca2005-09-19 03:54:46 +000031- test__locale is skipped on OS X < 10.4 (only partial locale support is
32present).
33
Georg Brandl80bbf3f2005-09-14 19:38:29 +000034- SF bug #893549: parsing keyword arguments was broken with a few format
35 codes.
36
Guido van Rossum8ee3e5a2005-09-14 18:09:42 +000037- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on AIX 5.3
38 with IBM's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1284289). This also closes SF
39 bug #105470: test_pwd fails on 64bit system (Opteron).
40
Guido van Rossum539c6622005-09-14 17:49:54 +000041- Changes donated by Elemental Security to make it work on HP-UX 11 on
42 Itanium2 with HP's 64-bit compiler (SF patch #1225212).
43
Georg Brandl4550b8d2005-08-26 06:43:52 +000044- Disallow keyword arguments for type constructors that don't use them
Georg Brandl02c42872005-08-26 06:42:30 +000045 (fixes bug #1119418).
46
Martin v. Löwisd35edda2005-08-24 08:39:24 +000047- Forward UnicodeDecodeError into SyntaxError for source encoding errors.
48
Barry Warsawe2eca0b2005-08-15 18:14:19 +000049- SF bug #900092: When tracing (e.g. for hotshot), restore 'return' events for
50 exceptions that cause a function to exit.
51
Raymond Hettinger9f1a6792005-07-31 01:16:36 +000052- The implementation of set() and frozenset() was revised to use its
53 own internal data structure. Memory consumption is reduced by 1/3
54 and there are modest speed-ups as well. The API is unchanged.
55
Tim Petersde7990b2005-07-17 23:45:23 +000056- SF bug #1238681: freed pointer is used in longobject.c:long_pow().
57
Michael W. Hudson0edc7a02005-07-12 10:21:19 +000058- SF bug #1229429: PyObject_CallMethod failed to decrement some
59 reference counts in some error exit cases.
60
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +000061- SF bug #1185883: Python's small-object memory allocator took over
62 a block managed by the platform C library whenever a realloc specified
63 a small new size. However, there's no portable way to know then how
64 much of the address space following the pointer is valid, so no
65 portable way to copy data from the C-managed block into Python's
66 small-object space without risking a memory fault. Python's small-object
67 realloc now leaves such blocks under the control of the platform C
68 realloc.
69
Michael W. Hudsonb8963812005-07-05 15:21:58 +000070- SF bug #1232517: An overflow error was not detected properly when
71 attempting to convert a large float to an int in os.utime().
72
Raymond Hettinger3296e692005-06-29 23:29:56 +000073- SF bug #1224347: hex longs now print with lowercase letters just
74 like their int counterparts.
75
Michael W. Hudson188d4362005-06-20 16:52:57 +000076- SF bug #1163563: the original fix for bug #1010677 ("thread Module
77 Breaks PyGILState_Ensure()") broke badly in the case of multiple
78 interpreter states; back out that fix and do a better job (see
79 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2005-June/054258.html
80 for a longer write-up of the problem).
81
Michael W. Hudsondf888462005-06-03 14:41:55 +000082- SF patch #1180995: marshal now uses a binary format by default when
83 serializing floats.
84
Michael W. Hudsonda85a902005-06-01 11:34:22 +000085- SF patch #1181301: on platforms that appear to use IEEE 754 floats,
86 the routines that promise to produce IEEE 754 binary representations
87 of floats now simply copy bytes around.
88
Skip Montanarobbf12ba2005-05-20 03:07:06 +000089- bug #967182: disallow opening files with 'wU' or 'aU' as specified by PEP
90 278.
91
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000092- patch #1109424: int, long, float, complex, and unicode now check for the
93 proper magic slot for type conversions when subclassed. Previously the
94 magic slot was ignored during conversion. Semantics now match the way
95 subclasses of str always behaved. int/long/float, conversion of an instance
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +000096 to the base class has been moved to the proper nb_* magic slot and out of
Brett Cannonc3647ac2005-04-26 03:45:26 +000097 PyNumber_*().
98 Thanks Walter Dörwald.
99
Barry Warsawc8d907c2005-04-19 23:43:40 +0000100- Descriptors defined in C with a PyGetSetDef structure, where the setter is
101 NULL, now raise an AttributeError when attempting to set or delete the
102 attribute. Previously a TypeError was raised, but this was inconsistent
103 with the equivalent pure-Python implementation.
104
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +0000105- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
106 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
107 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
108 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
109 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
110
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +0000111- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
112 disabled caused a crash.
113
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000114- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
115 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
116
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000117- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +0000118 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
119
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +0000120- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
121
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000122- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +0000123 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
124 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
125 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +0000126
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +0000127- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
128
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +0000129- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
130 returning None.
131
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000132- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +0000133 ('\') with a specific error message.
134
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +0000135- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
136
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +0000137- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
138 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
139
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000140- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +0000141 an ferror() call.
142
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000143- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
144 list.sort().
145
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +0000146- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
147 (2+3) --> (5).
148
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +0000149- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
150
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +0000151- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
152 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000153
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +0000154- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
155 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
156 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
157
Neil Schemenauercf52c072005-08-12 17:34:58 +0000158- Change the %s format specifier for str objects so that it returns a
159 unicode instance if the argument is not an instance of basestring and
160 calling __str__ on the argument returns a unicode instance.
161
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000162Extension Modules
163-----------------
164
Neal Norwitz484d9a42005-09-30 04:46:49 +0000165- Patch #1309009, Fix segfault in pyexpat when the XML document is in latin_1,
166 but Python incorrectly assumes it is in UTF-8 format
167
Georg Brandle677adc2005-09-29 13:40:49 +0000168- Fix parse errors in the readline module when compiling without threads.
169
Hye-Shik Chang9ceebd52005-09-24 14:58:47 +0000170- Patch #1288833: Removed thread lock from socket.getaddrinfo on
171 FreeBSD 5.3 and later versions which got thread-safe getaddrinfo(3).
172
Michael W. Hudson10402a32005-09-22 09:19:01 +0000173- Patches #1298449 and #1298499: Add some missing checks for error
174 returns in cStringIO.c.
175
Neal Norwitz058bde12005-09-21 06:44:25 +0000176- Patch #1297028: fix segfault if call type on MultibyteCodec,
177 MultibyteStreamReader, or MultibyteStreamWriter
178
Neal Norwitzcfe7dd92005-09-19 06:49:27 +0000179- Fix memory leak in posix.access().
180
Martin v. Löwis8b291e22005-09-18 08:17:56 +0000181- Patch #1213831: Fix typo in unicodedata._getcode.
182
Georg Brandlfb1ef852005-09-14 20:53:32 +0000183- Bug #1007046: os.startfile() did not accept unicode strings encoded in
184 the file system encoding.
185
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000186- Patch #756021: Special-case socket.inet_aton('255.255.255.255') for
187 platforms that don't have inet_aton().
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000188
Georg Brandld2e3ba72005-08-26 08:34:00 +0000189- Bug #1215928: Fix bz2.BZ2File.seek() for 64-bit file offsets.
190
191- Bug #1191043: Fix bz2.BZ2File.(x)readlines for files containing one
Georg Brandl02760f92005-08-25 13:10:41 +0000192 line without newlines.
193
Georg Brandl38387b82005-08-24 07:17:40 +0000194- Bug #728515: mmap.resize() now resizes the file on Unix as it did
195 on Windows.
196
Martin v. Löwisebd9d5b2005-08-09 15:00:59 +0000197- Patch #1180695: Add nanosecond stat resolution, and st_gen,
198 st_birthtime for FreeBSD.
199
Michael W. Hudson8137bea2005-07-27 20:24:40 +0000200- Patch #1231069: The fcntl.ioctl function now uses the 'I' code for
201 the request code argument, which results in more C-like behaviour
202 for large or negative values.
203
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000204- Bug #1234979: For the argument of thread.Lock.acquire, the Windows
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000205 implementation treated all integer values except 1 as false.
Georg Brandlaf410b52005-07-08 22:26:13 +0000206
Georg Brandl6b95f1d2005-06-03 19:47:00 +0000207- Bug #1194181: bz2.BZ2File didn't handle mode 'U' correctly.
208
Hye-Shik Chang5f937a72005-06-02 13:09:30 +0000209- Patch #1212117: os.stat().st_flags is now accessible as a attribute
210 if available on the platform.
211
Skip Montanaro5ff14922005-05-16 02:42:22 +0000212- Patch #1103951: Expose O_SHLOCK and O_EXLOCK in the posix module if
213 available on the platform.
214
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +0000215- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
216 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
217
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +0000218- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
219
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +0000220- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
221 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
222 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
223
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +0000224- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
225
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +0000226- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
227 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
228
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000229- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +0000230 file size.
231
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +0000232- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
233
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +0000234- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
235 {remove_history,replace_history}
236
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +0000237- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
238 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +0000239
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +0000240- stat_float_times is now True.
241
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +0000242- array.array objects are now picklable.
243
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000244- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
245 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
246
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000247- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
248 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
249 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
250
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000251- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
252 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000253
254Library
255-------
256
Georg Brandl8b813db2005-10-01 16:32:31 +0000257- Bug #729103: pydoc.py: Fix docother() method to accept additional
258 "parent" argument.
259
Georg Brandlaa935172005-09-29 20:49:16 +0000260- Patch #1300515: xdrlib.py: Fix pack_fstring() to really use null bytes
261 for padding.
262
Georg Brandl80ba8e82005-09-29 20:16:07 +0000263- Bug #1296004: httplib.py: Limit maximal amount of data read from the
264 socket to avoid a MemoryError on Windows.
265
Matthias Klosef3f231f2005-09-20 07:02:49 +0000266- Patch #1166948: locale.py: Prefer LC_ALL, LC_CTYPE and LANG over LANGUAGE
267 to get the correct encoding.
268
269- Patch #1166938: locale.py: Parse LANGUAGE as a colon separated list of
270 languages.
271
Martin v. Löwis4ed67382005-09-18 08:34:39 +0000272- Patch #1268314: Cache lines in StreamReader.readlines for performance.
273
Brett Cannona783d062005-09-15 02:34:56 +0000274- Bug #1290505: Fix clearing the regex cache for time.strptime().
275
Martin v. Löwis5dbdc592005-08-27 10:07:56 +0000276- Bug #1167128: Fix size of a symlink in a tarfile to be 0.
277
Georg Brandl5a650a22005-08-26 08:51:34 +0000278- Patch #810023: Fix off-by-one bug in urllib.urlretrieve reporthook
279 functionality.
280
Martin v. Löwis8b595142005-08-25 11:03:38 +0000281- Bug #1163178: Make IDNA return an empty string when the input is empty.
282
Georg Brandl532efab2005-08-24 22:34:21 +0000283- Patch #848017: Make Cookie more RFC-compliant. Use CRLF as default output
284 separator and do not output trailing semicola.
285
Georg Brandlb9256022005-08-24 18:46:39 +0000286- Patch #1062060: urllib.urlretrieve() now raises a new exception, named
287 ContentTooShortException, when the actually downloaded size does not
288 match the Content-Length header.
289
Martin v. Löwis0a5d4a22005-08-24 14:55:22 +0000290- Bug #1121494: distutils.dir_utils.mkpath now accepts Unicode strings.
291
Martin v. Löwis56066d22005-08-24 07:38:12 +0000292- Bug #1178484: Return complete lines from codec stream readers
293 even if there is an exception in later lines, resulting in
294 correct line numbers for decoding errors in source code.
295
Georg Brandl6d2b3462005-08-24 07:36:17 +0000296- Bug #1192315: Disallow negative arguments to clear() in pdb.
297
Martin v. Löwisb813c532005-08-07 20:51:04 +0000298- Patch #827386: Support absolute source paths in msvccompiler.py.
299
Georg Brandl649f8e72005-08-03 07:30:12 +0000300- Patch #1105730: Apply the new implementation of commonprefix in posixpath
301 to ntpath, macpath, os2emxpath and riscospath.
302
Guido van Rossum755149f2005-07-27 00:00:44 +0000303- Fix a problem in Tkinter introduced by SF patch #869468: delete bogus
304 __hasattr__ and __delattr__ methods on class Tk that were breaking
305 Tkdnd.
306
Georg Brandl5dbda752005-07-17 20:27:41 +0000307- Bug #1015140: disambiguated the term "article id" in nntplib docs and
308 docstrings to either "article number" or "message id".
309
Georg Brandla4a8b822005-07-15 09:13:21 +0000310- Bug #1238170: threading.Thread.__init__ no longer has "kwargs={}" as a
311 parameter, but uses the usual "kwargs=None".
312
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000313- textwrap now processes text chunks at O(n) speed instead of O(n**2).
Raymond Hettinger8bfa8932005-07-15 06:53:35 +0000314 Patch #1209527 (Contributed by Connelly).
315
Georg Brandl5c5fe2f2005-07-14 06:40:47 +0000316- urllib2 has now an attribute 'httpresponses' mapping from HTTP status code
317 to W3C name (404 -> 'Not Found'). RFE #1216944.
318
Georg Brandl9e43acf2005-07-04 17:16:07 +0000319- Bug #1177468: Don't cache the /dev/urandom file descriptor for os.urandom,
320 as this can cause problems with apps closing all file descriptors.
321
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000322- Bug #839151: Fix an attempt to access sys.argv in the warnings module
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000323 it can be missing in embedded interpreters
Georg Brandl5284b532005-06-26 22:54:58 +0000324
Georg Brandl2f210b62005-06-26 22:09:06 +0000325- Bug #1155638: Fix a bug which affected HTTP 0.9 responses in httplib.
326
Georg Brandlfbff1bc2005-06-26 21:36:25 +0000327- Bug #1100201: Cross-site scripting was possible on BaseHTTPServer via
328 error messages.
329
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000330- Bug #1108948: Cookie.py produced invalid JavaScript code.
331
Raymond Hettingerda99d1c2005-06-21 07:43:58 +0000332- The tokenize module now detects and reports indentation errors.
333 Bug #1224621.
334
Raymond Hettinger68c04532005-06-10 11:05:19 +0000335- The tokenize module has a new untokenize() function to support a full
336 roundtrip from lexed tokens back to Python sourcecode. In addition,
337 the generate_tokens() function now accepts a callable argument that
338 terminates by raising StopIteration.
339
Georg Brandl9166e1a2005-06-04 09:20:03 +0000340- Bug #1196315: fix weakref.WeakValueDictionary constructor.
341
Georg Brandl268e61c2005-06-03 14:28:50 +0000342- Bug #1213894: os.path.realpath didn't resolve symlinks that were the first
343 component of the path.
344
Skip Montanaro174dd222005-05-14 20:54:16 +0000345- Patch #1120353: The xmlrpclib module provides better, more transparent,
346 support for datetime.{datetime,date,time} objects. With use_datetime set
347 to True, applications shouldn't have to fiddle with the DateTime wrapper
348 class at all.
349
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000350- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
351 files to PyPI.
352
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000353- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
354 them to PyPI.
355
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000356- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
357 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
358 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
359 work as expected.
360
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000361- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
362 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
363
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000364- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000365 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
366
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000367- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
368
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000369- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
370 to build.
371
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000372- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
373 symbolic links on Windows.
374
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000375- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000376 profile.py if available.
377
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000378- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
379
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000380- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
381 in LWPCookieJar.
382
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000383- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
384
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000385- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
386
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000387- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
388
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000389- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
390
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000391- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
392
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000393- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
394
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000395- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
396
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000397- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
398
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000399- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
400 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
401 be exploited in various ways.
402
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000403- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
404
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000405- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
406
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000407- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
408
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000409- Enhancements to the csv module:
410
411 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
Georg Brandl7eb4b7d2005-07-22 21:49:32 +0000412 reflecting its capabilities, and improving its compliance with
Tim Petersecc6e6a2005-07-10 22:30:55 +0000413 PEP 305.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000414 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
415 reporting.
416 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
417 dictates.
418 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000419 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000420 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000421 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
422 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000423 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
424 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000425 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000426 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
427 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
428 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
429 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
430 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
431 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
432 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
433 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
434 without first creating a dialect class.
435 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
436 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
437 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000438 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000439 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
440 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000441 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
442 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
443 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
444 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000445 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
446 This has been fixed.
447
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000448- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
449 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
450 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
451 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
452
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000453- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
454
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000455- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
456 (Bug #951915).
457
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000458- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
459 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
460 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
Andrew M. Kuchling88b85822005-08-23 00:57:07 +0000461 encoding alias table.
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000462
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000463- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
464
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000465- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
466 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
467
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000468- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
469
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000470- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
471
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000472- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
473
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000474- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
475
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000476- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
477
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000478- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
479 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
480 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
481
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000482- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000483 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000484
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000485- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
486 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
487 tokenizer with very long source lines.
488
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000489- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
490 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
491
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000492- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
493 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000494
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000495- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
496 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
497
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000498- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
499 correctly.
500
Walter Dörwaldbc8e6422005-04-21 21:32:03 +0000501- Partial fixes for SF bugs #1163244 and #1175396: If a chunk read by
502 ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` has a trailing "\r", read one more
503 character even if the user has passed a size parameter to get a proper
504 line ending. Remove the special handling of a "\r\n" that has been split
505 between two lines.
506
Walter Dörwalda47d1c02005-08-30 10:23:14 +0000507- Bug #1251300: On UCS-4 builds the "unicode-internal" codec will now complain
508 about illegal code points. The codec now supports PEP 293 style error
509 handlers.
510
Walter Dörwald78a78b02005-09-01 12:04:29 +0000511- Bug #1235646: ``codecs.StreamRecoder.next()`` now reencodes the data it reads
Walter Dörwaldc5238b82005-09-01 11:56:53 +0000512 from the input stream, so that the output is a byte string in the correct
513 encoding instead of a unicode string.
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000514
Gustavo Niemeyer6fa0c5a2005-09-14 08:54:39 +0000515- Bug #1202493: Fixing SRE parser to handle '{}' as perl does, rather than
516 considering it exactly like a '*'.
517
518
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000519Build
520-----
521
Martin v. Löwis147fbe52005-08-07 21:09:30 +0000522- Bug #1189330: configure did not correctly determine the necessary
523 value of LINKCC if python was built with GCC 4.0.
524
Trent Mick8321b422005-07-26 02:29:21 +0000525- Upgrade Windows build to zlib 1.2.3 which eliminates a potential security
526 vulnerability in zlib 1.2.1 and 1.2.2.
527
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000528- EXTRA_CFLAGS has been introduced as an environment variable to hold compiler
529 flags that change binary compatibility. Changes were also made to
530 distutils.sysconfig to also use the environment variable when used during
Martin v. Löwisd7c795e2005-04-25 07:14:03 +0000531 compilation of the interpreter and of C extensions through distutils.
Brett Cannon08cd5982005-04-24 22:26:38 +0000532
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000533- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
534 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
535 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
536
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000537- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
538
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000539- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
540 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
541
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000542- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
543 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
544 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
545 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
546 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
547 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
548 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
549 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
550
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000551- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
552 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
553 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
554 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
555
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000556
557C API
558-----
559
Raymond Hettingerbeb31012005-08-16 03:47:52 +0000560- Added a C API for set and frozenset objects.
561
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000562- Removed PyRange_New().
563
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000564
565Tests
566-----
567
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000568- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000569
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000570
571Documentation
572-------------
573
Georg Brandl32252422005-09-14 20:42:00 +0000574- Bug #1274828: Document os.path.splitunc().
575
Georg Brandl79c122f2005-08-24 07:31:33 +0000576- Bug #1190204: Clarify which directories are searched by site.py.
577
Georg Brandl6f2bbd32005-08-24 07:26:55 +0000578- Bug #1193849: Clarify os.path.expanduser() documentation.
579
Georg Brandlf13c4ba2005-08-02 10:28:08 +0000580- Bug #1243192: re.UNICODE and re.LOCALE affect \d, \D, \s and \S.
581
Georg Brandl150db732005-07-18 08:53:17 +0000582- Bug #755617: Document the effects of os.chown() on Windows.
583
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000584- Patch #1180012: The documentation for modulefinder is now in the library reference.
585
586- Patch #1213031: Document that os.chown() accepts argument values of -1.
587
588- Bug #1190563: Document os.waitpid() return value with WNOHANG flag.
589
590- Bug #1175022: Correct the example code for property().
591
Georg Brandl40c71652005-06-25 21:08:46 +0000592- Document the IterableUserDict class in the UserDict module.
593 Closes bug #1166582.
594
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000595- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
596 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
597 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
598
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000599Mac
600---
601
602
Hye-Shik Chang4e422812005-07-17 02:36:59 +0000603New platforms
604-------------
605
606- FreeBSD 7 support is added.
607
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000608
609Tools/Demos
610-----------
611
Georg Brandl56897312005-08-24 18:32:30 +0000612- Added two new files to Tools/scripts: pysource.py, which recursively
613 finds Python source files, and findnocoding.py, which finds Python
614 source files that need an encoding declaration.
615 Patch #784089, credits to Oleg Broytmann.
616
Georg Brandl379f99d2005-06-26 21:09:38 +0000617- Bug #1072853: pindent.py used an uninitialized variable.
618
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000619- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000620
621
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000622What's New in Python 2.4 final?
623===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000624
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000625*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000626
627Core and builtins
628-----------------
629
630- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
631 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
632 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
633
634
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000635What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
636==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000637
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000638*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000639
640Core and builtins
641-----------------
642
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000643- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
644 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
645 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
646
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000647
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000648Library
649-------
650
651- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
652 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
653 raised is re-raised.
654
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000655- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
656 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
657
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000658- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
659 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
660 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
661 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
662 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
663 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
664 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
665 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
666 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
667 by the slice are recomputed now.
668
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000669- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000670
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000671Build
672-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000673
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000674- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
675 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
676 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000677
678C API
679-----
680
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000681- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
682
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000683
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000684What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
685================================
686
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000687*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000688
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000689License
690-------
691
692The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
693is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
694changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
695Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
696intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
697durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
698the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
699License::
700
701 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
702
703says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
704to Python 2.1.1.
705
706The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
707License Version 2.
708
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000709Core and builtins
710-----------------
711
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000712- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
713 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
714 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
715 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
716 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
717 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
718 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
719 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
720 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
721 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
722
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000723- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000724
725Extension Modules
726-----------------
727
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000728- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
729 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
730 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
731 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000732
733Library
734-------
735
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000736- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
737 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
738 returned.
739
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000740- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
741
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000742- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
743 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
744
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000745- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
746
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000747- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
748 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000749
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000750- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
751
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000752- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
753
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000754- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000755 the source code is updated and reloaded.
756
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000757Build
758-----
759
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000760- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000761
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000762What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
763================================
764
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000765*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000766
767Core and builtins
768-----------------
769
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000770- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000771 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
772
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000773- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
774 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
775 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
776 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
777
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000778- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
779 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
780
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000781- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
782 constant.
783
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000784- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
785 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
786 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
787 large), and to anomalies such as
788 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
789 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
790 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
791 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000792
793Extension modules
794-----------------
795
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000796- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
797 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000798 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
799 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
800 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000801
802Library
803-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000804
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000805- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000806 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000807 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
808 --swig-cpp.
809
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000810- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
811 it is set.
812
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000813- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000814
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000815- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
816 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
817 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
818 Closes bug #1039270.
819
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000820- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000821
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000822 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000823 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
824 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
825 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
826 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
827 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
828 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
829 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
830 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
831 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
832 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
833 + Updates to documentation.
834
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000835- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
836 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
837 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
838 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
839
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000840- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000841
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000842- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
843 applications should use the getmember function.
844
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000845- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
846
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000847- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
848 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
849 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
850 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
851 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
852 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
853 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
854 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
855 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
856
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000857- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
858 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000859 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000860
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000861- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
862 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
863 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
864 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
865 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
866 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
867 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
868 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000869
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000870- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
871 the new public features (of which there are many).
872
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000873- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000874 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
875 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
876 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
877 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000878 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000879
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000880- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
881
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000882- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
883 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
884 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
885 options.
886
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000887- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
888 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
889 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
890 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
891 conditions under which non-string values work.
892
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000893Build
894-----
895
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000896- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
897 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
898 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
899
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000900- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
901 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
902 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
903 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
904 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000905
906C API
907-----
908
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000909- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
910 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
911
912- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
913
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000914- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
915 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
916 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
917 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
918 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
919 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
920 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
921 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
922 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
923
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000924- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
925
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000926- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
927 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
928 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000929
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000930Tests
931-----
932
933- test__locale ported to unittest
934
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000935Mac
936---
937
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000938- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
939 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
940 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000941
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000942Tools/Demos
943-----------
944
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000945- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
946 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
947 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
948 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
949 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000950
951
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000952What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
953=================================
954
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000955*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000956
957Core and builtins
958-----------------
959
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000960- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000961 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
962
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000963- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
964 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
965 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
966 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
967 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
968 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
969 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
970 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000971 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
972 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
973 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
974 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
975 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000976
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000977- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
978 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
979 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
980 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
981 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
982
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000983- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
984
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000985- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
986 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
987
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000988- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
989 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
990 modified the list.
991
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000992- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
993 functions is now writable.
994
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000995- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
996 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
997 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
998 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
999
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001000- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
1001 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
1002 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
1003 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
1004 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +00001005
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +00001006- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
1007 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
1008
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001009Extension modules
1010-----------------
1011
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001012- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
1013
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +00001014- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
1015 data.
1016
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001017- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
1018 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
1019 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
1020 supposed to have been truncated away.
1021
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +00001022- Added socket.socketpair().
1023
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +00001024- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
1025 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
1026
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001027- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +00001028 versions of Python, have now been removed.
1029
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001030Library
1031-------
1032
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001033- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001034 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +00001035
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +00001036- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
1037 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
1038
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +00001039- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
1040 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
1041
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +00001042- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
1043
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +00001044- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
1045 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +00001046
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +00001047- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
1048 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
1049
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +00001050- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
1051
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +00001052- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
1053
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +00001054- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
1055
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +00001056- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
1057 Percivall.
1058
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +00001059- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
1060 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
1061
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001062- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
1063 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
1064 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +00001065 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +00001066
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001067- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
1068 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
1069 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
1070 and exponent.
1071
1072- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
1073
1074- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
Georg Brandl08c02db2005-07-22 18:39:19 +00001075 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatibility and atexit
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001076 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
1077
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001078- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
1079 to the readline module.
1080
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001081- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001082 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
1083 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +00001084
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +00001085- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
1086 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
1087 contains symlinks.
1088
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +00001089- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
1090 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
1091
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +00001092- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
1093 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
1094 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1095
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +00001096- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
1097 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
1098 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
1099 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
1100 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
1101 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
1102 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
1103 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
1104 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
1105 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
1106 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
1107 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
1108 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
1109
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +00001110- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
1111
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001112Tools/Demos
1113-----------
1114
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +00001115- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
1116 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
1117
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +00001118- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
1119
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001120Build
1121-----
1122
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +00001123- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
1124 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
1125 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
1126 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
1127 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
1128 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
1129 plans to do so.
1130
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +00001131- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
1132 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
1133
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +00001134- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
1135 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
1136
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +00001137- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
1138 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
1139
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +00001140- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
1141 GNU/k*BSD systems.
1142
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +00001143- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
1144 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
1145
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001146C API
1147-----
1148
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001149..
1150
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001151Documentation
1152-------------
1153
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +00001154- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
1155 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
1156
1157- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
1158 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
1159 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +00001160
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001161New platforms
1162-------------
1163
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +00001164- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
1165
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001166Tests
1167-----
1168
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001169..
1170
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001171Windows
1172-------
1173
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +00001174- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
1175 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
1176 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
1177 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
1178 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
1179 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
1180 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
1181 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
1182 the problem.
1183
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001184Mac
1185---
1186
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001187..
1188
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00001189
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001190What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
1191=================================
1192
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001193*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001194
1195Core and builtins
1196-----------------
1197
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +00001198- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
1199 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
1200 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
1201 sensitive code.
1202
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001203- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +00001204 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001205
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001206 @staticmethod
1207 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +00001208
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +00001209 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +00001210
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001211- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
1212 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
1213 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
1214 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
1215 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
1216 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
1217 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
1218 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
1219 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
1220 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
1221 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
1222
1223 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
1224 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
1225 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
1226 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
1227 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
1228 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
1229 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
1230
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +00001231- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
1232 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
1233
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001234- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001235 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +00001236
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001237- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001238 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001239 which was missing for no apparent reason.
1240
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001241- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001242 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
1243 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
1244
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001245- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
1246 types that support garbage collection.
1247
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +00001248- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
1249
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +00001250- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
1251 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
1252 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
1253 Jython.
1254
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001255- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
1256
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +00001257- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
1258 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
1259
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +00001260- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
1261 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
1262 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +00001263
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +00001264- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
1265 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
1266 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
1267
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001268Extension modules
1269-----------------
1270
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +00001271- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
1272
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001273Library
1274-------
1275
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +00001276- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
1277 TIS-620
1278
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +00001279- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
1280 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
1281 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
1282 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
1283 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
1284 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
1285 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
1286 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
1287 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
1288 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
1289
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +00001290- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
1291
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +00001292- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
1293 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
1294 same as when the argument is omitted).
1295 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
1296
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +00001297- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
1298
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +00001299- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1300 schemes are offered.
1301
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001302- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1303
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001304- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1305 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1306 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1307
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001308- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1309
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001310- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1311 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1312
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001313- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1314 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1315 when dummy_threading is being used.
1316
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001317- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1318 from a tarfile.
1319
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001320- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001321 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001322
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001323- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1324 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1325 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1326 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1327
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001328- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1329 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1330
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001331- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1332 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1333 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1334 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1335 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1336 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1337 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1338 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1339 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1340 by some other method in progress).
1341
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001342- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1343 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1344 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001345
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001346- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1347
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001348- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1349 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1350 AM Kuchling.
1351
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001352- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1353 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1354 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1355
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001356- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1357 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1358 instead of unsigned.
1359
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001360- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001361 no longer part of the public API.
1362
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001363- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1364 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1365 string methods of the same name).
1366
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001367- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001368 SF patch 945642.
1369
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001370- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1371
1372 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1373
1374 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1375 DocTestSuites.
1376
1377- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1378 that provide thread-local data.
1379
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001380- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1381 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1382
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001383- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1384
1385- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1386 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1387 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1388
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001389- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1390
1391 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1392 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1393 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001394
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001395 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1396 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1397 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1398 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1399
1400 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1401 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1402
1403 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1404 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1405 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1406 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1407
1408 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1409 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1410 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1411 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1412 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1413
1414 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1415 wrapping help output.
1416
1417 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1418 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1419 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001420
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001421C API
1422-----
1423
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001424- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1425 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1426 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1427 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1428 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1429 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1430 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1431 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1432 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1433 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1434 its visible semantics have not changed.
1435
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001436- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1437 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1438
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001439Documentation
1440-------------
1441
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001442- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001443
1444 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001445 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001446
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001447 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001448
1449 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1450
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001451- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001452
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001453Tests
1454-----
1455
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001456- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001457 platforms that use the Makefile.
1458
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001459- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1460 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1461 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1462
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001463
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001464What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1465=================================
1466
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001467*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001468
1469Core and builtins
1470-----------------
1471
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001472- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1473 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1474 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1475 objects now (one object instead of three).
1476
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001477- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1478 Windows DLLs.
1479
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001480- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1481 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001482
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001483- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1484 a new .pyc magic.
1485
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001486- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1487 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1488 be there.
1489
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001490- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1491 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1492 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1493
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001494- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1495 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1496 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1497
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001498- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1499
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001500- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1501 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1502 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001503
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001504- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1505 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1506
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001507- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1508
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001509- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001510 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001511
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001512- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1513
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001514- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1515
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001516- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1517 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1518
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001519- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1520 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1521 Fixes bug #858016 .
1522
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001523- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1524 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1525 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1526
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001527- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1528 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1529 improves their performance (about 35%).
1530
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001531- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1532 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1533 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1534
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001535- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1536 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1537 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1538 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1539
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001540- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1541 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001542 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001543 length is not known).
1544
1545- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1546 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001547 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1548 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001549 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1550
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001551- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1552 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1553
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001554- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1555 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1556 keyword arguments.
1557
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001558- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1559 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1560 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1561
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001562- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1563 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1564 cases.
1565
1566- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1567 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1568 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1569 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1570 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1571 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1572 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1573 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1574 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1575 a release build.
1576
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001577- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1578 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1579
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001580- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001581 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001582
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001583- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1584 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1585 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1586 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1587 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1588 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1589 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1590 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1591 destroyed.
1592
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001593- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1594 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1595 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1596 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1597 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1598 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1599 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1600 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1601
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001602- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1603 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1604 character other than a space.
1605
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001606- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1607 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1608 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1609 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1610 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1611 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1612 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1613 attributes with the same name.
1614
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001615- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1616 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1617 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1618 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1619 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1620 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1621 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1622 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1623 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1624 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1625 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1626 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1627 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1628 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001629
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001630- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1631 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1632 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1633 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1634 This has been repaired.
1635
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001636- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1637
1638- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1639
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001640- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1641 over a sequence.
1642
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001643- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001644 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001645
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001646- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1647
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001648- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1649 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1650 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1651 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1652 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1653 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1654 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1655 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1656
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001657- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1658 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1659 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1660
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001661- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1662 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1663 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1664 freelist.
1665
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001666- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1667 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1668
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001669- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1670 number.
1671
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001672- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1673 a TypeError exception.
1674
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001675- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1676 820195.
1677
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001678- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1679 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1680 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1681
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001682- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001683 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1684 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001685
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001686- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1687 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1688 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1689
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001690- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1691 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001692 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001693
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001694- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001695 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1696 the first call.
1697
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001698
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001699Extension modules
1700-----------------
1701
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001702- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1703 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1704
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001705- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1706 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1707 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1708 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1709 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1710 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1711 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001712
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001713- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1714
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001715- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1716
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001717- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1718 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1719
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001720- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1721 fewer false positives.
1722
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001723- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1724 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1725
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001726- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001727 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1728
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001729- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001730 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001731 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001732 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1733 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001734
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001735- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1736 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1737 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1738 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1739
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001740- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1741 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1742 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1743 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1744 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1745 #897625.
1746
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001747- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1748 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1749
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001750- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1751 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1752 and pops on either side of the deque.
1753
1754- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1755 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1756
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001757- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1758 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1759 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1760 other functions that expect a function argument.
1761
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001762- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1763
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001764- os.getsid was added.
1765
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001766- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1767 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1768 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1769
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001770- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1771
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001772- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1773
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001774- readline.clear_history was added.
1775
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001776- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1777
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001778- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1779
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001780- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1781
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001782- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1783
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001784- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1785
1786- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1787
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001788- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1789
1790- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1791
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001792- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1793 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1794 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1795
1796- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1797 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1798 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1799 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1800 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1801 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1802 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1803
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001804- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1805 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1806 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1807 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001808
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001809- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001810 iterators from a single iterable.
1811
1812- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1813 of raising a TypeError exception.
1814
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001815- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1816 as parameter.
1817
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001818Library
1819-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001820
Georg Brandlf0de6a12005-08-22 18:02:59 +00001821- Bug #1266283: The new function "lexists" is now in os.path.__all__.
1822
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001823- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1824 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1825 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001826
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001827- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1828 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1829 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001830
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001831- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001832
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001833- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1834 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001835
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001836- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1837 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1838
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001839- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1840
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001841- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001842 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001843
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001844- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001845 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001846
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001847- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1848
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001849- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1850 on cygwin and mingw32.
1851
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001852- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1853
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001854- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1855 module.
1856
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001857- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1858 installation scheme for all platforms.
1859
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001860- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001861 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001862
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001863- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1864 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1865 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1866
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001867- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1868 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1869 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1870
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001871- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1872
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001873- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1874
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001875- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1876 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1877
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001878- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1879 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1880 type pattern with the same value exists.
1881
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001882- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1883 when run from the command prompt).
1884
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001885- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1886 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1887
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001888- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1889 default sort).
1890
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001891- Added global runctx function to profile module
1892
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001893- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1894
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001895- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1896
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001897- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1898
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001899- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001900 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1901 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1902 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1903 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1904 accordingly.
1905
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001906- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1907 decoding standards.
1908
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001909- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1910 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1911 called for all requests.
1912
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001913- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1914 they are passed to the compiler.
1915
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001916- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1917 indent, width and depth.
1918
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001919- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1920 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1921
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001922- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1923 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1924
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001925- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1926
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001927- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1928
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001929- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1930
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001931- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1932 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1933
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001934- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001935 for better performance.
1936
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001937- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001938
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001939- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1940 a string).
1941
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001942- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1943
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001944- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1945
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001946- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1947
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001948- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1949
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001950- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1951 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1952 list of fieldnames.
1953
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001954- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1955 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1956
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001957- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1958
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001959- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1960 empty lists.
1961
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001962- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1963 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1964 and shelves.
1965
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001966- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1967 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1968
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001969- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001970 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1971 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001972
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001973- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1974 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001975 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001976
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001977- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001978 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1979 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1980
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001981- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1982 and removed in Py2.4.
1983
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001984- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1985
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001986- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1987
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001988Tools/Demos
1989-----------
1990
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001991- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1992 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1993
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001994- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1995
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001996- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1997 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1998 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1999 destination in situations where both files are given.
2000
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00002001- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
2002 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
2003 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
2004 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
2005
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00002006- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
2007
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00002008- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
2009 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
2010 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
2011 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
2012 now.
2013
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002014- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
2015 in effect
2016
2017- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
2018 C-c C-h
2019
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00002020- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
2021 -d option was given.
2022
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002023Build
2024-----
2025
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00002026- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
2027 build under OS X.
2028
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00002029- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
2030 --enable-profiling.
2031
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00002032- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
2033 is configured --with-tsc.
2034
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00002035- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
2036 on AMD64.
2037
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00002038- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
2039 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
2040
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00002041- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
2042 removed.
2043
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00002044- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
2045 supported (see PEP 11).
2046
2047- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
2048
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00002049- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
2050
2051- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
2052 (see PEP 11).
2053
2054- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
2055 sizeof(char) must be 1.
2056
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002057C API
2058-----
2059
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00002060- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
2061 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
2062 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
2063
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00002064- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
2065 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
2066 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
2067 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
2068
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00002069- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
2070 generator objects.
2071
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002072- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
2073 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00002074 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
2075 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00002076
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00002077- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
2078 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
2079
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00002080- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
2081 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
2082 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
2083 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
2084 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
2085
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00002086- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
2087 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
2088 about 10% faster.
2089
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00002090- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
2091 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
2092
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00002093- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
2094 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
2095 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
2096 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
2097
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002098Windows
2099-------
2100
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00002101- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
2102 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
2103 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
2104 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
2105
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00002106- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
2107 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
2108 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
2109
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00002110
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002111What's New in Python 2.3 final?
2112===============================
2113
2114*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
2115
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002116IDLE
2117----
2118
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00002119- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
2120 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
2121 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
2122 context-menu actions.
2123
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002124- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
2125 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
2126 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
2127 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
2128 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
2129 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
2130 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
2131 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
2132 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
2133
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00002134
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002135What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
2136=============================================
2137
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00002138*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002139
2140Core and builtins
2141-----------------
2142
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002143- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002144 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00002145 comment at the end are still unsupported.
2146
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002147Extension modules
2148-----------------
2149
2150- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
2151 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
2152 than once. This has been fixed.
2153
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00002154- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
2155 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
2156 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
2157 call.
2158
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002159- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
2160
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002161Library
2162-------
2163
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002164- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
2165 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
2166
2167- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
2168 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
2169 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
2170 restored.
2171
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002172IDLE
2173----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002174
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00002175- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002176
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002177Build
2178-----
2179
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002180- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
2181 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
2182
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002183C API
2184-----
2185
2186Windows
2187-------
2188
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00002189- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
2190 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
2191
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002192- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
2193
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002194Mac
2195---
2196
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00002197- Various fixes to pimp.
2198
2199- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
2200
2201- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
2202 more problems than it solves.
2203
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002204
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002205What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
2206=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002207
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00002208*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
2209
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002210Core and builtins
2211-----------------
2212
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00002213- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
2214 by sys.setcheckinterval().
2215
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002216- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
2217 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002218 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002219
2220- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
2221 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
2222 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002223 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002224
2225- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
2226 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002227
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002228- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
2229 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
2230 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
2231
2232- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002233 770247.
2234
2235- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002236
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002237Extension modules
2238-----------------
2239
2240- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
2241 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
2242
2243- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
2244
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002245- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
2246
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00002247- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
2248 contained within the _strptime module.
2249
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002250- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
2251 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
2252
2253- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002254 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
2255
2256- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
2257 the find_class attribute, if present.
2258
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00002259- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002260
2261 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
2262 (SF bug 763298).
2263
2264 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00002265 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
2266 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
2267 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002268
2269 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
2270
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002271Library
2272-------
2273
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002274- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
2275
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00002276- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
2277 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
2278 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
2279 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
2280 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
2281 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
2282 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
2283 or Tester().
2284
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002285- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
2286 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
2287 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
2288 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
2289 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
2290 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
2291 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
2292 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
2293 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00002294
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002295 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00002296
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00002297- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
2298 weren't before was an oversight.
2299
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002300- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
2301 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2302
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002303- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2304 when there are no lines.
2305
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002306- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2307 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2308
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002309- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2310 to child processes.
2311
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002312- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2313
2314- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2315
2316- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2317 xmlrpclib.
2318
2319- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2320 responses.
2321
2322- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2323 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2324
2325- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2326 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2327 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2328
2329- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2330 used as patterns.
2331
2332- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2333 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2334 than Tk 8.3.
2335
2336- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2337
2338- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002339
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002340Tools/Demos
2341-----------
2342
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002343- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2344
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002345- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2346
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002347- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002348
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002349Build
2350-----
2351
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002352- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2353
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002354- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2355
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002356- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2357 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002358
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002359- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2360 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2361 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002362
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002363C API
2364-----
2365
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002366- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2367 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2368
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002369Windows
2370-------
2371
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002372- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2373 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2374 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2375 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2376 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2377 Python exception ::
2378
2379 thread.error: can't start new thread
2380
2381 is raised now.
2382
2383- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2384 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2385 instead of from DLL teardown.
2386
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002387Mac
2388---
2389
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002390- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002391 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002392 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2393 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2394 the executable in the bundle.
2395
2396- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002397
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002398- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2399
2400- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2401 on Panther.
2402
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002403What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2404================================
2405
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002406*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002407
2408Core and builtins
2409-----------------
2410
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002411- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2412 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2413 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2414 with the -i option.
2415
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002416- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2417 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2418
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002419- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2420 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2421
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002422- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2423 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2424 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2425 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2426 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2427 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2428 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2429 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2430 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2431 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2432 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2433 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2434 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002435
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002436- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2437 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2438 embedded in a lambda expression.
2439
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002440- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2441 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2442 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2443 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2444 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2445
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002446- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2447 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2448 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2449
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002450- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2451 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2452
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002453- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2454 It's writable again.
2455
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002456- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2457 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2458 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002459 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002460
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002461- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2462 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2463 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2464
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002465Extension modules
2466-----------------
2467
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002468- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2469 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2470
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002471- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2472 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2473 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2474 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2475
2476- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2477 collection.
2478
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002479- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2480 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2481 unique within a single program run.
2482
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002483- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2484 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2485
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002486- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2487 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2488
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002489- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2490 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002491
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002492- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2493
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002494- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2495 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2496
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002497- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2498 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2499 for many BSD-derived systems.
2500
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002501
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002502Library
2503-------
2504
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002505- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2506 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2507 primary ones:
2508
2509 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2510 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2511 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2512
2513 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2514 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2515 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2516 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2517 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2518 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2519
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002520- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2521 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2522 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2523 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2524 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2525 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2526 argument.
2527
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002528- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2529 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2530 in the archive.
2531
2532- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2533 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2534
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002535- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2536 569574).
2537
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002538- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2539 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2540 no more.
2541
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002542- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2543 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2544 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2545 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2546 code coverage.
2547
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002548- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2549 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2550 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002551 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2552 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002553
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002554- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2555 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2556 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002557 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002558
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002559- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2560
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002561- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2562 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2563 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2564 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2565
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002566- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2567 handling.
2568
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002569- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2570 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2571
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002572- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2573 in socket.py.
2574
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002575- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2576
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002577- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2578 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2579 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2580 opener with proxy support.
2581
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002582- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2583
2584- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2585
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002586Tools/Demos
2587-----------
2588
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002589- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2590
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002591- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2592
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002593- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2594 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002595
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002596- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2597 files.
2598
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002599Build
2600-----
2601
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002602- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002603 different root directory.
2604
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002605C API
2606-----
2607
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002608- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2609 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2610 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2611 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2612 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2613 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2614 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2615 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2616 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2617 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2618
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002619- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2620 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2621 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2622 from Python.
2623
2624
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002625New platforms
2626-------------
2627
2628None this time.
2629
2630Tests
2631-----
2632
2633- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2634 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2635
2636Windows
2637-------
2638
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002639- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2640
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002641- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2642 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2643 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2644 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2645 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2646 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2647 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2648 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2649 that's what it's for.
2650
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002651Mac
2652---
2653
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002654- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2655 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2656 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2657 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002658- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2659 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2660- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002661
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002662SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2663------------------------------------
2664
2665430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2666598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2667622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2668661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2669683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2670697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2671713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2672724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2673727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2674729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2675730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2676731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2677732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2678733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2679735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2680740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2681744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2682745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2683747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2684749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2685751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2686753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2687755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2688757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2689760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2690
2691
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002692What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2693================================
2694
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002695*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002696
2697Core and builtins
2698-----------------
2699
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002700- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2701 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2702
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002703- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2704 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2705 and cannot be strings).
2706
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002707- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2708 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2709 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2710 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2711
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002712- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2713 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2714 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2715 Python itself.
2716
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002717- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2718 the referenced object, if it has one.
2719
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002720- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2721 the thread started at
2722 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2723
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002724- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2725 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2726 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2727 placed on a list index.
2728
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002729- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2730 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2731 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2732 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2733
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002734- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2735 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2736 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2737 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2738 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2739 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2740 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2741
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002742- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2743 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2744 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2745 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2746 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2747
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002748- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2749 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002750
2751- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2752 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2753 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2754 #693195.)
2755
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002756- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2757 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002758
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002759- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002760 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002761 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2762 interpreter executions, would fail.
2763
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002764- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002765 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002766 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002767
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002768Extension modules
2769-----------------
2770
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002771- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2772 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2773 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2774 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2775
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002776- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2777 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2778
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002779- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2780 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2781 and Greg Chapman.)
2782
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002783- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2784 recursively.
2785
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002786- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002787 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2788 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2789 leaks.
2790
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002791- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2792
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002793- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2794 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2795 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2796 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2797 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2798 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2799 #705836.
2800
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002801- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002802 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2803
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002804- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2805 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2806 See SF bug #692416.
2807
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002808- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2809 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2810
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002811- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2812 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2813 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002814
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002815- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002816 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2817 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2818
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002819- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2820 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2821 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2822 timeouts to work properly.
2823
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002824Library
2825-------
2826
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002827- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2828 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2829 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2830 future release.
2831
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002832- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2833 for querying platform dependent features.
2834
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002835- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002836
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002837- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2838 pickle protocol versions.
2839
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002840- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2841 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2842 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2843
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002844- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2845
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002846- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2847 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2848 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2849 modules.
2850
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002851- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2852 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2853 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2854
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002855- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2856 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2857
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002858- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2859 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2860 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2861
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002862- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002863 MS Office extensions.
2864
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002865- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2866 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2867
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002868- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2869 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2870
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002871- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2872 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2873 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2874 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2875 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2876 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2877
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002878- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2879 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2880 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002881
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002882- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2883 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2884 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2885
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002886- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2887
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002888- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2889 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2890 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2891
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002892Tools/Demos
2893-----------
2894
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002895- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2896 See the module docstring for details.
2897
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002898Build
2899-----
2900
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002901- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2902 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002903
2904C API
2905-----
2906
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002907- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2908
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002909- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2910 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2911 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2912
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002913- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2914 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002915
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002916 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2917 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2918 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002919
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002920- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002921 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2922
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002923- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2924 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2925 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002926
2927New platforms
2928-------------
2929
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002930None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002931
2932Tests
2933-----
2934
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002935- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2936 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002937
2938Windows
2939-------
2940
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002941- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2942 function.
2943
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002944- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2945 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002946
2947Mac
2948---
2949
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002950- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2951 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002952
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002953- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2954 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002955
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002956- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2957 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2958 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002959
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002960- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002961 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2962 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002963
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002964- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2965 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002966
2967
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002968What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2969=================================
2970
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002971*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002972
2973Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002974-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002975
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002976- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2977 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2978 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2979
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002980- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2981 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2982 (SF patch #664376.)
2983
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002984- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2985 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2986 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2987 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2988 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2989 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002990 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002991
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002992- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2993 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2994 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2995 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002996 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002997
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002998- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2999 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
3000 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
3001 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
3002 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
3003 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
3004 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
3005 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
3006 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
3007 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
3008 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
3009
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00003010- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
3011 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
3012 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
3013 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
3014 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
3015 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
3016
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00003017- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
3018 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
3019
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00003020- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
3021 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
3022 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
3023 case.)
3024
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00003025- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
3026 passed as unicode strings.
3027
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00003028- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
3029 See SF bug #683467.
3030
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00003031- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
3032 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
3033
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00003034- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
3035
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00003036- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
3037
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00003038- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
3039 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
3040 arguments.
3041
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00003042- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
3043 See SF bug #667147.
3044
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003045- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003046 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00003047 See SF bug #676155.
3048
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003049- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003050 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00003051 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
3052 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
3053 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
3054 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
3055 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
3056 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00003057
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003058Extension modules
3059-----------------
3060
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003061- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
3062 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3063 tp_as_number pointer.
3064
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00003065- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
3066 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
3067 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
3068 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
3069 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
3070
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003071- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
3072
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00003073- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
3074
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003075- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00003076 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00003077 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
3078 patch #678531.)
3079
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00003080- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
3081 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
3082
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00003083- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
3084 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
3085
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00003086- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
3087
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00003088- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
3089 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
3090 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
3091
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003092- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
3093
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003094- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
3095 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
3096
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003097- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003098
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003099- datetime changes:
3100
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00003101 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
3102
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003103 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
3104 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
3105 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
3106 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
3107 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
3108 now.
3109
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003110 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003111 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
3112 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00003113
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003114 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003115 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003116 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
3117 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
3118 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
3119 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003120
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003121 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
3122 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
3123 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00003124 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
3125
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00003126 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
3127 by a later example coded by Guido.
3128
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003129 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003130 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
3131 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
3132 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00003133 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
3134 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
3135
3136 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
3137 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
3138 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
3139 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
3140 tzinfo subclass instance.
3141
3142 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
3143 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
3144 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
3145 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
3146 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
3147 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
3148 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
3149 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00003150
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003151 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
3152 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
3153 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
3154 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
3155 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003156 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
3157
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003158 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003159
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00003160 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
3161 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
3162 as a naive datetime object.
3163
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00003164 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
3165 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
3166 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
3167
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00003168 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
3169 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
3170 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
3171 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
3172 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
3173 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
3174 comparison.
3175
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003176 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
3177 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
3178 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
3179 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003180 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003181
3182 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003183
3184 and ::
3185
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003186 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
3187
3188 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
3189 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
3190 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
3191 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
3192
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00003193 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
3194 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
3195 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
3196 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
3197 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
3198
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003199 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
3200 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00003201 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
3202 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00003203
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003204Library
3205-------
3206
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003207- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
3208 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
3209
3210- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
3211 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
3212 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
3213 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
3214 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
3215 See PEP 307 for details.
3216
3217- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
3218 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
3219
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003220- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
3221 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003222 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003223 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
3224 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00003225 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00003226
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00003227- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
3228 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
3229
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003230- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
3231 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
3232 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
3233
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00003234- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
3235
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00003236- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
3237 exception.
3238
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00003239- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
3240 class.
3241
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00003242- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
3243 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
3244 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
3245
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00003246- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
3247 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
3248
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003249- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00003250 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
3251 See SF bug #659228.
3252
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00003253- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
3254 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
3255 See SF patch #651082.
3256
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00003257- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003258
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00003259- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
3260 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
3261
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003262- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003263 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00003264
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00003265- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
3266 DOS paths from other platforms.
3267
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003268Tools/Demos
3269-----------
3270
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003271- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
3272 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
3273 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
3274 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
3275 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
3276 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
3277 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
3278 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
3279 example:
3280
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00003281 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
3282 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003283
3284 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
3285
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003286
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003287Build
3288-----
3289
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003290- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
3291 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
3292 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003293 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
3294
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00003295 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
3296
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00003297- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
3298 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
3299 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
3300 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
3301 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3302 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3303 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3304 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3305 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3306
3307- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3308 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3309 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3310 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3311
3312- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3313 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3314
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003315C API
3316-----
3317
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003318- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3319 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003320
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003321- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3322 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3323 tp_as_number pointer.
3324
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003325- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3326 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3327 (SF #681367)
3328
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003329- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3330 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3331 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3332 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003333
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003334Tests
3335-----
3336
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003337- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003338 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3339 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3340 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3341 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3342 pydoc.)
3343
3344- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3345
3346- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003347
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003348Windows
3349-------
3350
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003351- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3352 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3353 time).
3354
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003355- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3356 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3357
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003358- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3359 release without strong cryptography.
3360
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003361- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003362 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003363
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003364- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3365 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3366
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003367Mac
3368---
3369
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003370- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3371 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003372
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003373- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3374 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3375 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003376
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003377- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3378 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003379
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003380- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3381 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3382 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3383 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003384
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003385- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003386 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3387 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3388 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003389
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003390
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003391What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003392=================================
3393
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003394*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003395
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003396Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003397--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003398
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003399- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3400
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003401- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3402 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003403 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003404 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003405 a different meaning than before.
3406
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003407- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003408 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003409 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003410
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003411- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003412 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003413 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003414
3415- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3416 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3417 and deallocation.
3418
3419- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3420 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3421
3422- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3423 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3424 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3425 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3426 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3427
3428- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3429 now detected by the garbage collector.
3430
3431- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3432 [SF bug 519621]
3433
3434- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3435 identifier.
3436
3437- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3438 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3439 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3440 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3441 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3442 [SF bug 563060]
3443
3444- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3445 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3446 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3447 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3448 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3449
3450- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3451 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3452 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3453
3454- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3455
3456- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3457 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3458 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3459 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3460 state of the slots would be lost.)
3461
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003462Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003463-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003464
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003465- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003466 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3467 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3468 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3469 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003470 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3471 Jython 2.1.
3472
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003473- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003474 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003475 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3476 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3477 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3478 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3479 these, see PEP 302.
3480
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003481- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3482 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3483 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3484
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003485- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3486 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3487 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3488
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003489- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3490 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3491 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3492
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003493- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3494 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3495 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3496 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3497 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3498 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3499 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3500 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3501 releases or implementations.
3502
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003503- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003504 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3505 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003506
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003507- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3508 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3509
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003510- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3511 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3512 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3513
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003514- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3515 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3516
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003517- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3518 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003519 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3520 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003521
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003522- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3523 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3524 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3525 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3526 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3527
3528 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3529 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3530 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3531 pattern.
3532
3533 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3534 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3535 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3536 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3537
3538 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3539 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3540 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3541 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3542 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3543 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3544
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003545- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3546 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3547 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3548 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3549 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3550 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3551 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3552 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003553
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003554- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3555 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3556 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3557 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3558 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003559 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3560 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3561 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3562 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3563 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3564 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3565 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003566
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003567- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3568 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3569
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003570- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3571 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3572 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3573 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3574 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3575 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3576 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3577 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3578 to Zack Weinberg!
3579
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003580- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3581 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3582 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3583 type. This has been fixed now.
3584
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003585- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3586 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3587 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3588
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003589- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3590 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3591 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3592 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3593 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3594 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3595 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3596 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003597 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003598
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003599- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3600 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3601 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003602
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003603- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3604 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3605 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3606 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3607 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3608 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3609 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3610 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003611 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003612 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3613 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3614
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003615- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3616 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3617 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3618 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3619 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3620 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3621 this.)
3622
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003623- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3624 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003625 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003626 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003627 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3628 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003629 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3630 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003631
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003632- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3633 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3634 currently running.
3635
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003636- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3637 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3638 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3639 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3640
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003641- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3642 as directory names.
3643
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003644- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3645 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3646
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003647- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3648 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3649
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003650- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003651 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3652 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003653
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003654- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3655 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3656 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3657 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3658 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3659
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003660- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3661 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3662 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3663 removed.
3664
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003665- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3666 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3667 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3668
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003669- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3670 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3671 to __debug__.
3672
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003673- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3674 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3675 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3676
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003677- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3678 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3679 deprecated now.
3680
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003681- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3682 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3683 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003684
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003685- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3686 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3687 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3688 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3689 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003690
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003691- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3692 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3693
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003694- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3695 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3696 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003697 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003698 is backward compatible.
3699
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003700- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3701 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3702 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3703 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3704 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3705
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003706- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3707 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3708 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3709 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3710 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3711 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003712
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003713- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3714 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3715
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003716- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3717 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3718
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003719- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3720 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3721 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3722 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3723 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3724
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003725- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3726 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3727 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3728
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003729- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003730 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3731
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003732- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3733 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3734 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003735
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003736- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3737 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3738
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003739- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3740 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3741 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3742
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003743- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3744
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003745Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003746-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003747
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003748- Added three operators to the operator module:
3749 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3750 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3751 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3752
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003753- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3754
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003755- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3756 archives.
3757
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003758- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3759 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3760 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3761
3762 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3763
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003764- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3765 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3766 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003767 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003768
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003769- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3770 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3771 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3772 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003773 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3774 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3775 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3776 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003777
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003778- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3779 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003780
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003781- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3782
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003783- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3784 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3785
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003786- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3787 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3788 supported.
3789
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003790- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3791
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003792- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3793 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003794
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003795- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3796 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3797
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003798- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3799
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003800- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3801 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3802
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003803- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3804 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3805 functions but callable type objects.
3806
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003807- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003808 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003809 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003810
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003811- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3812 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003813
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003814- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3815 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003816
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003817- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3818 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3819 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3820 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3821
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003822- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3823 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003824
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003825- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3826 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3827 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3828 and __imul__.
3829
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003830- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003831 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3832 is called.
3833
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003834- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3835 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3836 interpreter was compiled.
3837
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003838- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3839 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3840 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003841 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003842 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3843 1, not 2.
3844
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003845- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3846 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3847 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3848 limit.
3849
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003850- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3851 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3852 bug #623464.
3853
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003854- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3855 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3856 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3857 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3858
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003859Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003860-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003861
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003862- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3863
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003864- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3865 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3866 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3867 with Python 2.3a2.
3868
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003869- os.path exposes getctime.
3870
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003871- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003872 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003873 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003874 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003875 unit tests of floating point results.
3876
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003877- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3878 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3879 has been increased.
3880
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003881- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3882 executed.
3883
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003884- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3885 postinstallation script.
3886
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003887- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3888 test the current module.
3889
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003890- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003891 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3892 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3893 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3894 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3895
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003896- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003897 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003898 Ward's Optik package.
3899
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003900- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3901 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3902 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3903 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3904
3905- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3906 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003907 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003908
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003909- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3910 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3911 shelf are binary pickles.
3912
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003913- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3914 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3915
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003916- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3917 modules are iterators now.
3918
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003919- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3920 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3921 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3922 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3923 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3924 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003925
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003926- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3927 with their entity value.
3928
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003929- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3930
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003931- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3932 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003933
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003934- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3935 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003936 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003937
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003938- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3939 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3940 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3941 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3942 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3943 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3944 main():
3945
3946 import locale
3947 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3948
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003949- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3950 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3951
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003952- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3953 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3954 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3955 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3956 to the new standard.
3957
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003958- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3959 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3960 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3961 an extension to the database.
3962
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003963- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3964 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3965 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3966 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003967 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003968
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003969- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003970 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003971
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003972- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3973 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3974 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3975 bounded integers.
3976
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003977- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3978 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3979 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3980 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3981 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3982 in existence.
3983
3984 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3985 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3986 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3987 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3988 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3989 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3990
3991 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3992 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3993 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3994 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3995
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003996- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3997 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3998 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3999
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00004000- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
4001
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004002- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
4003 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
4004 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
4005 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
4006
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00004007- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
4008 argument.
4009
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00004010- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
4011 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
4012 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
4013 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
4014 [SF patch 560794].
4015
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004016- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
4017 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
4018 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00004019 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
4020 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
4021 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00004022
4023- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
4024 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00004025
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00004026- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
4027 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
4028 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
4029 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00004030
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00004031- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
4032 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
4033 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
4034 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
4035 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
4036
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004037- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00004038
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00004039- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
4040
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00004041- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
4042 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
4043 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
4044 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
4045 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
4046 identical to None.
4047
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00004048- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
4049 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
4050 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
4051 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
4052 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
4053 results now.
4054
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00004055- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
4056 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
4057
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00004058- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
4059 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
4060 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
4061 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
4062 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
4063 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
4064 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
4065 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
4066
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00004067- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
4068
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00004069- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
4070 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
4071
4072- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
4073 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
4074 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
4075 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
4076 and other systems.
4077
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00004078- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
4079 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
4080 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
4081 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 +00004082 work well with these.
4083
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00004084- compileall now supports quiet operation.
4085
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004086- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00004087 connections.
4088
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00004089- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
4090 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
4091 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
4092
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00004093- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
4094 sets
4095
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00004096- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
4097 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
4098 name.
4099
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00004100- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
4101 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
4102 passed in.
4103
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004104- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00004105 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00004106 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
4107 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00004108
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00004109- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
4110
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00004111- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
4112
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00004113- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
4114 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
4115 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
4116
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004117- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
4118 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
4119 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
4120 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00004121 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00004122
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004123- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004124 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004125 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00004126
4127- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
4128 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
4129 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
4130
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00004131- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00004132 the value of its expression argument.
4133
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00004134- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
4135 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
4136 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
4137
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00004138- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
4139 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
4140 skipstone browser was included.
4141
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00004142- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
4143 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
4144
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004145Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004147
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00004148- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
4149 names in addition to accepting file names.
4150
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00004151- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
4152 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
4153 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
4154 still used and useful.)
4155
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00004156- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
4157 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
4158 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
4159 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00004160
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00004161- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
4162 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
4163 the generated binary.
4164
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004165Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004166-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004167
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00004168- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
4169
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004170- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
4171 except in the hands of experts.
4172
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00004173- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00004174 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
4175 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
4176 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00004177
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00004178- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
4179 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
4180 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
4181 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
4182 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
4183 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
4184 builds.
4185
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00004186- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
4187 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
4188 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
4189 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
4190 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
4191 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
4192 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
4193 new type.
4194
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00004195- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00004196
4197 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
4198 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
4199 positive infinities.
4200
4201 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
4202 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
4203 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
4204 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
4205 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
4206 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
4207 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
4208
4209 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
4210
4211 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
4212
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00004213- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
4214 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
4215 size of the executable.
4216
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00004217- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
4218 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
4219 configure script. On other platforms, remove
4220 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00004221
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00004222- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
4223
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00004224- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
4225 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
4226 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00004227
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00004228- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
4229 well as Unix.
4230
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00004231- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
4232 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
4233 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
4234 modules in the README file for details.
4235
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004236C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004237-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004238
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004239- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
4240 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004241 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00004242 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00004243 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00004244
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004245- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
4246 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
4247 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
4248 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
4249 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
4250 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004251 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00004252 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
4253 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
4254 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
4255 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
4256 aligned.)
4257
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00004258- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
4259 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
4260 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
4261
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00004262- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
4263 level.
4264
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00004265- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
4266 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
4267 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
4268 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
4269 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
4270
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00004271- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
4272 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
4273 code.
4274
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00004275- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
4276 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
4277 adjusting for negative indices.
4278
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00004279- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
4280 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
4281 object.
4282
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00004283- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
4284 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
4285 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
4286
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004287- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
4288 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00004289
4290- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
4291
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00004292- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
4293 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
4294 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
4295 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
4296
4297- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
4298
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00004299- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00004300
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004301- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004302 without going through the buffer API.
4303
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004304- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004305
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004306- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4307 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4308 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4309 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4310
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004311- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4312 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4313
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004314- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004315 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4316
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004317New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004318-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004319
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004320- OpenVMS is now supported.
4321
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004322- AtheOS is now supported.
4323
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004324- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4325
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004326- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4327
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004328Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004329-----
4330
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004331- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4332 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4333 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004334
4335Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004336-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004337
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004338- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4339 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4340 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4341 bugs.
4342 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004343 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004344 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4345 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004346 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004347
4348- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004349 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004350
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004351- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4352 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4353
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004354- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4355 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004356 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004357 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4358
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004359- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4360 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4361 use files" uninstall option).
4362
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004363- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4364
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004365- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4366 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4367
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004368- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4369 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4370 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4371
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004372- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4373 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4374 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4375 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4376 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004377 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4378 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4379 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004380
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004381- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004382 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004383 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4384 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4385 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4386 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4387 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4388 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4389 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4390 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4391 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4392 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4393 work around.
4394
4395- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4396 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4397 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4398 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4399 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4400 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4401 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4402 specified with O_CREAT too).
4403
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004404Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004405----
4406
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004407- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004408
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004409- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4410 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4411 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4412
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004413- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4414 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4415 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4416
4417- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4418 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4419 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4420 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4421 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4422 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4423 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4424 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004425
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004426- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4427 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4428 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004429
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004430- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4431 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4432 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4433 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4434 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004435
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004436- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4437 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4438 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004439
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004440- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4441 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004442
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004443- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4444 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4445 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4446 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4447 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004448
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004449- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4450 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4451 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4452
4453- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4454 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4455 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004456
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004457- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4458 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4459 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4460 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004461 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004462
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004463- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4464 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004465
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004466- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4467 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004468
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004469- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004470 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004471 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4472 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004473
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004474
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004475What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004476===============================
4477
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004478*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4479
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004480Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004481--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004482
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004483- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4484 with a custom metaclass.
4485
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004486Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004487-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004488
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004489- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4490 are proxies.
4491
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004492Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004493-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004494
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004495- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4496 very short strings.
4497
4498- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4499 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4500 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4501 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4502 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4503
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004504Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004505-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004506
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004507- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4508 close or delete time).
4509
4510- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4511 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4512
4513- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4514
4515- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004516 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004517
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004518Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004519-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004520
4521Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004522-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004523
4524C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004525-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004526
4527New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004528-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004529
4530Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004531-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004532
4533Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004534-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004535
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004536- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4537
4538- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4539 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4540
4541- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4542 deleted at process exit time.
4543
4544- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4545 in backslash.
4546
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004547Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004548----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004549
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004550- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4551 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4552 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4553
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004554
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004555What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004556===========================
4557
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004558*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4559
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004560Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004561--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004562
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004563- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4564 been extensively updated. See
4565
4566 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4567
4568 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4569
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004570- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4571 deleted!
4572
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004573- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4574 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4575 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4576 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4577 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4578
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004579- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4580
4581 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4582 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4583
4584 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4585 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4586 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4587 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4588 supported anyway.
4589
4590 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4591 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4592
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004593- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4594 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4595 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4596 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4597 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004598
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004599- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4600 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4601 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4602
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004603Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004604-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004605
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004606- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4607 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4608 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4609 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4610 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4611 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004612 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4613 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4614 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4615 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004616
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004617- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4618 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4619 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4620
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004621Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004622-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004623
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004624- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4625
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004626Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004627-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004628
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004629- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4630 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4631 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4632 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4633 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4634 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4635
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004636- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4637
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004638- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4639
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004640- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4641
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004642- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4643 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4644 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4645
4646- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4647
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004648Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004649-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004650
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004651- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4652 off a search on Google.
4653
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004654Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004655-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004656
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004657- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4658 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4659 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4660 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4661 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4662 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4663 other platforms should do likewise.
4664
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004665- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4666 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4667 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4668
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004669C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004670-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004671
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004672- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4673 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4674 producing key-value pairs.
4675
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004676- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004677 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004678 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4679 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4680 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4681 previously went unchallenged.
4682
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004683New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004684-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004685
4686Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004687-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004688
4689Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004690-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004691
4692Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004693----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004694
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004695- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4696 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004697
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004698- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4699 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4700 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4701 home.
4702
4703
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004704What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004705===========================
4706
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004707*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4708
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004709Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004710--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004711
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004712- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4713 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004714
4715 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004716 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004717
4718 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4719 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004720 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004721 This needs to be documented.
4722
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004723- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4724 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4725
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004726- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4727 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4728 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4729
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004730- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4731 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4732
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004733- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4734 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4735 class forbids it).
4736
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004737- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4738 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4739 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4740
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004741- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4742
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004743Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004744-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004745
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004746- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4747 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004748 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004749
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004750- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4751 (like 1 + '').
4752
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004753Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004754-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004755
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004756- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4757 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4758 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4759 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004760 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004761 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4762
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004763- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4764 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4765 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4766 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4767
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004768- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4769 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004770 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4771 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4772 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004773
4774- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4775 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004776
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004777- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4778 bytes on its input.
4779
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004780Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004781-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004782
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004783- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004784 convenience function.
4785
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004786- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4787 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4788 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004789 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4790 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4791 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4792 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4793 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4794 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004795
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004796- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4797 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4798 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4799 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4800
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004801- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4802 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4803 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4804
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004805- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4806 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4807 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4808 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4809
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004810- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4811 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004812 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004813 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4814 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4815 new -l and -e options.
4816
4817- statcache is now deprecated.
4818
4819- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4820 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004821 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004822 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4823 time properly taken into account.
4824
4825- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4826 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4827 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4828 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4829
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004830Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004831-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004832
4833Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004834-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004835
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004836- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4837 is built with libdb3 if available.
4838
4839- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4840
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004841C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004842-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004843
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004844- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4845 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4846 PySequence_Size().
4847
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004848- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4849
4850- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4851 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4852 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4853
4854- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4855 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4856
4857- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4858 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4859
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004860New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004861-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004862
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004863- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4864 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4865
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004866- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4867 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4868
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004869- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4870
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004871Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004872-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004873
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004874- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4875 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4876
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004877Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004878-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004879
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004880Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004881----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004882
4883- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4884 removed completely in the next release.
4885
4886- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4887 OSX.
4888
4889- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4890 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4891
4892- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4893
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004894
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004895What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004896===========================
4897
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004898*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4899
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004900Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004901--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004902
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004903- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004904 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004905 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004906 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4907 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004908 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4909 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004910 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4911 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004912
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004913- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4914 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4915
4916- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4917 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4918
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004919Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004920-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004921
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004922- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4923 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4924 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4925 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4926 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4927 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4928 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4929 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4930
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004931- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4932 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4933 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4934 example).
4935
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004936- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004937 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004938 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004939 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004940
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004941- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4942 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4943 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004944 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004945
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004946- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4947 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4948 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4949 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4950 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4951 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4952
4953 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4954
4955 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4956
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004957Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004958-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004959
4960- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4961
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004962- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4963
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004964- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4965 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004966
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004967- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4968 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4969 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4970 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4971 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4972 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004973 attributes.
4974
4975- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4976 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4977 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004978
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004979- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4980 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4981 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004982
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004983- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4984 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4985 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004986 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4987 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4988
4989- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4990 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004991
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004992Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004993-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004994
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004995- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4996 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4997
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004998- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4999 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
5000 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
5001 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
5002
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00005003- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
5004 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
5005 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
5006 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
5007
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00005008 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
5009 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
5010 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
5011 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
5012 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
5013 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
5014 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
5015 without losing information).
5016
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005017- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005018 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
5019 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
5020 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
5021 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
5022 module).
5023
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00005024 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00005025 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
5026 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
5027 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
5028 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00005029
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00005030- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00005031 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
5032 encoding.
5033
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00005034- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
5035 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
5036
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005037- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005038 to allow saving the message body to a file.
5039
5040- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
5041 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
5042 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
5043 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
5044
5045- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
5046
5047- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
5048 ON, and OFF.
5049
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00005050- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
5051 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
5052
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005053Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005054-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00005055
5056- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
5057 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
5058 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005059
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005060- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
5061 been added: -X and -E.
5062
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005063Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005064-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005065
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00005066- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
5067 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
5068
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005069C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005070-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005071
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00005072- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
5073 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
5074 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
5075 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
5076 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
5077
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00005078- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
5079 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
5080 as long) arguments.
5081
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00005082- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
5083 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
5084 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
5085 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
5086 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
5087 report any bugs or strange behavior).
5088
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00005089- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
5090 input.
5091
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005092New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005093-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005094
5095Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005096-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005097
5098Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005099-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005100
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00005101- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
5102 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
5103 is created for .py and .pyw files.
5104
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005105- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
5106 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
5107 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005108 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005109
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005110 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
5111 # (SIGINT) behavior.
5112 import signal
5113 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005114
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005115 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005116 while 1:
5117 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005118 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005119 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
5120 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
5121 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
5122 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00005123
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00005124
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005125What's New in Python 2.2a4?
5126===========================
5127
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005128*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
5129
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005130Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005131--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005132
5133- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
5134 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
5135 documentation for all operations on list objects.
5136
5137- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
5138 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
5139 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
5140 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
5141 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
5142 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
5143 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005144
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005145- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005146 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00005147 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
5148 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
5149 associate a docstring with a property.
5150
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005151- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
5152 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
5153 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
5154 other built-in object types.
5155
5156- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
5157 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
5158 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
5159 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
5160 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
5161
5162- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
5163 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
5164
5165- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
5166 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005167 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005168 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
5169 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
5170 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
5171 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
5172 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
5173
5174- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
5175 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
5176 class.
5177
5178- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
5179 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
5180 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
5181 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
5182
5183- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
5184 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
5185 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
5186 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
5187
5188- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
5189 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
5190
5191- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
5192 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
5193 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
5194 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
5195 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00005196 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005197 with the same value as s.
5198
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00005199- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
5200
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005201Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005202----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00005203
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00005204- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
5205
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00005206- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
5207 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
5208 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
5209 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
5210 objects.
5211
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00005212- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
5213 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00005214 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
5215 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
5216
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005217- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
5218 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
5219 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
5220
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005221Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005222-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005223
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00005224- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5225 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
5226 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
5227 by the instances.
5228
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00005229- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
5230 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
5231 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
5232
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005233- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
5234 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
5235 before the entire comparison is complete.
5236
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00005237- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
5238 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
5239 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
5240
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00005241- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
5242 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
5243 getwriter().
5244
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005245- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
5246 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
5247
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00005248- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005249 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
5250 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
5251
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00005252- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
5253 iterable object.
5254
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005255- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
5256 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005257
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005258- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
5259 authentication.
5260
5261- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
5262 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00005263
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005264- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00005265 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
5266 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
5267 a sample driver.)
5268
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005269Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005270-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005271
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005272- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
5273 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
5274 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
5275 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
5276 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
5277 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
5278 kernel has large file support.
5279
5280- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
5281 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
5282 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
5283 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
5284 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
5285
5286- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
5287 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
5288 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
5289
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005290C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005291-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005292
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005293- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
5294 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
5295
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005296New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005297-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005298
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005299- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
5300 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
5301
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005302Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005303-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005304
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005305- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5306 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5307 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5308 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5309 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5310
5311- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5312 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5313 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5314 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5315
5316- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5317 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5318
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005319Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005320-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005321
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005322- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005323 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5324 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005325
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005326
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005327What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5328===========================
5329
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005330*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5331
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005332Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005333----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005334
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005335- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5336 big to represent as a C double.
5337
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005338- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5339 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5340 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5341 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5342 restriction).
5343
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005344- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5345 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5346 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5347 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5348 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5349
5350 >>> dir([])
5351 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5352 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5353 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5354 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5355 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5356 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5357 'reverse', 'sort']
5358
5359 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5360
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005361- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005362 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5363 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5364 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5365 OverflowError exception.
5366
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005367- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005368 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005369 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5370 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5371 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5372 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5373 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005374 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005375 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5376 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5377
5378 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5379 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5380 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5381 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005382
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005383- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005384 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5385 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5386 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5387 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5388 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5389 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5390 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5391 once it is created.
5392
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005393- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5394 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5395 (key, value) pairs.
5396
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005397- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005398 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5399 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5400
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005401- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5402 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5403 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5404 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5405 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005406
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005407- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005408 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5409 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5410
5411 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5412
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005413- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005414 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5415
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005416Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005417-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005418
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005419- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005420 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5421 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005422
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005423- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5424 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5425 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5426 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5427 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5428 in this area anymore).
5429
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005430- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5431 threading.Timer.
5432
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005433- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5434 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5435
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005436- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005437 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5438
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005439- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005440 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5441 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5442 converted to Python longs.
5443
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005444- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005445 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5446
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005447- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5448 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5449 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5450
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005451Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005452-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005453
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005454- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5455 division operators as per PEP 238.
5456
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005457Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005458-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005459
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005460- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5461 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5462 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5463 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5464
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005465C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005466-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005467
5468- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005469
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005470- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5471 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005472 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005473
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005474 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5475 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005476 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005477 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005478
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005479- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005480 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5481 module:
5482
5483 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005484
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005485 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5486 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005487
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005488 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5489 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005490
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005491 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5492
5493 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5494
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005495- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005496 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5497 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5498 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005499
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005500New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005501-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005502
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005503- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5504 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5505 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5506 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5507 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005508
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005509Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005510-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005511
5512Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005513-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005514
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005515- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5516 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5517 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5518 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005519 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5520 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5521 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5522 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5523 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005524
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005525- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005526 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5527
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005528
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005529What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5530===========================
5531
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005532*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5533
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005534Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005535-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005536
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005537- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5538 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5539
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005540- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5541 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5542 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005543
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005544- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5545 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5546 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5547 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005548
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005549- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5550
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005551- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005552
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005553Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005554-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005555
5556- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005557 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005558 the module docstring for details.
5559
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005560Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005561-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005562
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005563- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005564 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5565 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5566 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005567
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005568- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5569 Nick Mathewson.
5570
5571Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005572----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005573
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005574- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5575 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5576 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5577 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5578 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5579 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5580 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5581 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5582
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005583- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5584 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5585 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5586 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5587
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005588- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5589 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5590 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5591 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5592 come a long way).
5593
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005594- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5595 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5596 write filters for these warnings).
5597
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005598- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5599 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5600 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5601 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5602 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5603
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005604- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5605 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5606 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5607 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5608 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5609 older distribution.
5610
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005611Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005612-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005613
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005614- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5615 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005616 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005617
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005618- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5619 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5620 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5621
5622- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5623
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005624- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5625
5626- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5627
5628- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5629
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005630- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005631
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005632- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5633
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005634New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005635-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005636
5637C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005638-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005639
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005640- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5641 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5642 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5643 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5644 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5645 against buffer overruns.
5646
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005647- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005648 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5649 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005650 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5651 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5652 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5653
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005654- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5655 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5656 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5657 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5658 deprecated.
5659
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005660Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005661-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005662
5663- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5664 relevant is found.
5665
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005666
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005667What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005668===========================
5669
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005670*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5671
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005672Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005673----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005674
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005675- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5676 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5677 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5678 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5679 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5680 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5681 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5682 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005683 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005684 repaired.
5685
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005686- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005687 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005688 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5689 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5690 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5691 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5692 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5693 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5694 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5695 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5696
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005697- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5698 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5699 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5700 leading BMO character).
5701
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005702- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5703 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5704 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5705
5706 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5707 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5708 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005709
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005710 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5711 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5712 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5713 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5714 for various simple to use conversions.
5715
5716 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5717 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5718
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005719 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5720 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5721 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5722 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5723 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5724 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5725 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5726 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5727 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5728 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5729 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5730 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5731 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5732 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5733 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005734
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005735- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5736 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5737 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005738 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005739 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005740
5741 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005742 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5743 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5744 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5745 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5746 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005747 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5748 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005749
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005750 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5751 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5752 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005753 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005754
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005755- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5756 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5757 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5758 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5759 floating arithmetic,
5760
5761 x = 9007199254740992.0
5762 print long(x)
5763
5764 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5765 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5766 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5767 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5768 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5769 functions are of good quality).
5770
5771 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5772 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5773 algorithms to break.
5774
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005775- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5776 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5777 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5778 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5779 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5780 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5781 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5782 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5783 order.
5784
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005785- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5786 operation along the most common code paths.
5787
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005788- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5789 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5790
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005791- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5792 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5793 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5794 {}.update(UserDict())
5795
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005796- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5797 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5798 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5799 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5800 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5801 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5802 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5803 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5804
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005805- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005806 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005807
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005808 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005809 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5810 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005811 join() method of strings
5812 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005813 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5814 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005815 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005816 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005817
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005818- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5819 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5820
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005821- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5822 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5823
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005824- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5825 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5826 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5827 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5828
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005829- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5830 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005831 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005832 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5833 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005834
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005835- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5836
5837
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005838Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005839-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005840
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005841- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005842 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005843 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5844 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5845
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005846- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5847 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5848
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005849- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5850 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5851 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5852 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5853
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005854- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5855 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5856 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5857
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005858- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5859
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005860- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5861
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005862- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5863 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5864 that are still imported into string.py).
5865
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005866- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5867
5868- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5869 Now it does.
5870
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005871- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5872
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005873- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5874 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5875 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5876 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5877 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005878 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5879 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005880
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005881- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5882 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5883 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5884 'help(object)'.
5885
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005886Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005887-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005888
5889- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005890 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005891 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5892 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5893
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005894- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005895 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5896 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005897
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005898C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005899-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005900
5901- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5902 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005903
5904----
5905
5906**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**