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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
15- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
16 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
17 which was missing for no apparent reason.
18
19- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
20 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
21 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
22
23Extension modules
24-----------------
25
26Library
27-------
28
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000029- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
30 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
31 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
32
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +000033- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
34 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
35 instead of unsigned.
36
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +000037- decimal.py now only uses signals in the spec. The other conditions are
38 no longer part of the public API.
39
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +000040- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
41 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
42 string methods of the same name).
43
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +000044- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
45 SF patch 982681.
46
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +000047- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
48 SF patch 945642.
49
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000050Tools/Demos
51-----------
52
53Build
54-----
55
56C API
57-----
58
59New platforms
60-------------
61
62Tests
63-----
64
65Windows
66-------
67
68Mac
69---
70
71
72
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000073What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
74=================================
75
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +000076*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000077
78Core and builtins
79-----------------
80
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +000081- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
82 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
83 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
84 objects now (one object instead of three).
85
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +000086- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
87 Windows DLLs.
88
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +000089- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
90
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +000091- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
92 a new .pyc magic.
93
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +000094- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
95 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
96 be there.
97
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +000098- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
99 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
100 the LC_NUMERIC category.
101
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000102- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
103 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
104 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
105
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000106- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
107
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000108- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
109 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
110 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000111
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000112- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
113 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
114
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000115- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
116
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000117- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000118 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000119
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000120- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
121
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000122- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
123
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000124- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
125 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
126
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000127- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
128 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
129 Fixes bug #858016 .
130
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000131- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
132 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
133 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
134
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000135- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
136 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
137 improves their performance (about 35%).
138
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000139- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
140 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
141 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
142
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000143- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
144 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
145 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
146 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
147
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000148- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
149 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
150 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
151 length is not known).
152
153- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
154 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000155 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
156 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000157 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
158
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000159- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
160 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
161
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000162- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
163 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
164 keyword arguments.
165
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000166- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
167 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
168 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
169
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000170- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
171 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
172 cases.
173
174- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
175 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
176 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
177 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
178 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
179 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
180 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
181 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
182 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
183 a release build.
184
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000185- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
186 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
187
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000188- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000189 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000190
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000191- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
192 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
193 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
194 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
195 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
196 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
197 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
198 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
199 destroyed.
200
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000201- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
202 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
203 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
204 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
205 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
206 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
207 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
208 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
209
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000210- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
211 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
212 character other than a space.
213
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000214- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
215 by the function object or by the method object, the function
216 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
217 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
218 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
219 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
220 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
221 attributes with the same name.
222
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000223- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
224 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
225 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
226 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
227 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
228 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
229 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
230 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
231 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
232 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
233 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
234 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
235 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
236 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000237
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000238- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
239 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
240 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
241 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
242 This has been repaired.
243
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000244- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
245
246- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
247
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000248- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
249 over a sequence.
250
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000251- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000252 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000253
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000254- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
255
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000256- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
257 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
258 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
259 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
260 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
261 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
262 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
263 records with equal keys is unchanged).
264
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000265- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
266 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
267 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
268
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000269- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
270 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
271 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
272 freelist.
273
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000274- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
275 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
276
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000277- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
278 number.
279
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000280- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
281 a TypeError exception.
282
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000283- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
284 820195.
285
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000286- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
287 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
288 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
289
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000290- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000291 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
292 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000293
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000294- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
295 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
296 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
297
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000298- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
299 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000300 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000301
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000302- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000303 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
304 the first call.
305
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000306
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000307Extension modules
308-----------------
309
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000310- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
311 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
312
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000313- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
314 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
315 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
316 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
317 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
318 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
319 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000320
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000321- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
322
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000323- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
324
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000325- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
326 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
327
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000328- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
329 fewer false positives.
330
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000331- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
332 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
333
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000334- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000335 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
336
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000337- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000338 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000339 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
340 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
341 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000342
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000343- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
344 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
345 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
346 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
347
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000348- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
349 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
350 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
351 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
352 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
353 #897625.
354
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000355- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
356 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
357
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000358- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
359 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
360 and pops on either side of the deque.
361
362- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
363 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
364
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000365- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
366 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
367 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
368 other functions that expect a function argument.
369
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000370- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
371
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000372- os.getsid was added.
373
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000374- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
375 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
376 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
377
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000378- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
379
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000380- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
381
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000382- readline.clear_history was added.
383
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000384- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
385
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000386- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
387
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000388- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
389
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000390- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
391
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000392- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
393
394- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
395
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000396- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
397
398- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
399
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000400- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
401 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
402 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
403
404- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
405 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
406 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
407 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
408 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
409 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
410 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
411
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000412- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
413 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
414 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
415 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000416
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000417- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000418 iterators from a single iterable.
419
420- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
421 of raising a TypeError exception.
422
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000423- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
424 as parameter.
425
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000426Library
427-------
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000428
429- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
430 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
431 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000432
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000433- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
434 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
435 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000436
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000437- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000438
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000439- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
440 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000441
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000442- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
443 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
444
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000445- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
446
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000447- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000448 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000449
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000450- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
451 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
452
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000453- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
454
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000455- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
456 on cygwin and mingw32.
457
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000458- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
459
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000460- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
461 module.
462
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000463- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
464 installation scheme for all platforms.
465
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000466- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000467 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000468
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000469- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
470 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
471 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
472
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000473- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
474 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
475 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
476
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000477- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
478
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000479- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
480
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000481- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
482 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
483
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000484- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
485 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
486 type pattern with the same value exists.
487
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000488- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
489 when run from the command prompt).
490
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000491- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
492 not taken into consideration when caching value.
493
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000494- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
495 default sort).
496
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000497- Added global runctx function to profile module
498
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000499- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
500
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000501- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
502
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000503- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
504
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000505- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000506 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
507 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
508 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
509 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
510 accordingly.
511
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000512- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
513 decoding standards.
514
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000515- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
516 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
517 called for all requests.
518
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000519- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
520 they are passed to the compiler.
521
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000522- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
523 indent, width and depth.
524
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000525- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
526 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
527
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000528- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
529 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
530
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000531- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
532
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000533- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
534
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000535- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
536
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000537- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
538 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
539
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000540- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000541 for better performance.
542
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000543- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000544
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000545- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
546 a string).
547
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000548- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
549
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000550- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
551
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000552- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
553
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000554- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
555
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000556- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
557 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
558 list of fieldnames.
559
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000560- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
561 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
562
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000563- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
564
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000565- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
566 empty lists.
567
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000568- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
569 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
570 and shelves.
571
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000572- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
573 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
574
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000575- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000576 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
577 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000578
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000579- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
580 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000581 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000582
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000583- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000584 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
585 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
586
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000587- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
588 and removed in Py2.4.
589
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000590- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
591
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000592- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
593
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000594Tools/Demos
595-----------
596
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000597- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
598 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
599
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000600- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
601
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000602- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
603 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
604 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
605 destination in situations where both files are given.
606
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000607- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
608 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
609 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
610 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
611
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000612- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
613
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000614- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
615 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
616 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
617 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
618 now.
619
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000620- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
621 in effect
622
623- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
624 C-c C-h
625
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000626- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
627 -d option was given.
628
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000629Build
630-----
631
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000632- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
633 build under OS X.
634
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000635- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
636 --enable-profiling.
637
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000638- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
639 is configured --with-tsc.
640
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000641- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
642 on AMD64.
643
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000644- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
645 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
646
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000647- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
648 removed.
649
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000650- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
651 supported (see PEP 11).
652
653- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
654
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000655- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
656
657- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
658 (see PEP 11).
659
660- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
661 sizeof(char) must be 1.
662
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000663C API
664-----
665
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000666- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
667 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
668 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
669
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000670- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
671 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
672 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
673 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
674
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000675- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
676 generator objects.
677
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000678- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
679 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000680 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
681 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000682
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000683- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
684 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
685
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000686- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
687 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
688 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
689 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
690 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
691
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000692- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
693 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
694 about 10% faster.
695
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000696- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
697 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
698
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000699- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
700 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
701 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
702 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
703
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000704Windows
705-------
706
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000707- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
708 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
709 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
710 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
711
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000712- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
713 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
714 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
715
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000716
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000717What's New in Python 2.3 final?
718===============================
719
720*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
721
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000722IDLE
723----
724
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000725- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
726 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
727 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
728 context-menu actions.
729
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000730- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
731 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
732 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
733 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
734 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
735 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
736 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
737 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
738 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
739
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000740
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000741What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
742=============================================
743
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000744*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000745
746Core and builtins
747-----------------
748
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000749- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000750 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000751 comment at the end are still unsupported.
752
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000753Extension modules
754-----------------
755
756- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
757 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
758 than once. This has been fixed.
759
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000760- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
761 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
762 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
763 call.
764
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000765- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
766
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000767Library
768-------
769
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000770- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
771 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
772
773- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
774 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
775 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
776 restored.
777
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000778IDLE
779----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000780
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000781- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000782
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000783Build
784-----
785
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000786- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
787 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
788
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000789C API
790-----
791
792Windows
793-------
794
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000795- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
796 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
797
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000798- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
799
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000800Mac
801---
802
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000803- Various fixes to pimp.
804
805- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
806
807- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
808 more problems than it solves.
809
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000810
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000811What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
812=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000813
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000814*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
815
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000816Core and builtins
817-----------------
818
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000819- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
820 by sys.setcheckinterval().
821
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000822- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
823 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000824 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000825
826- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
827 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
828 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000829 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000830
831- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
832 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000833
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000834- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
835 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
836 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
837
838- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000839 770247.
840
841- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000842
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000843Extension modules
844-----------------
845
846- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
847 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
848
849- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
850
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000851- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
852
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000853- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
854 contained within the _strptime module.
855
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000856- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
857 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
858
859- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000860 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
861
862- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
863 the find_class attribute, if present.
864
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000865- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000866
867 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
868 (SF bug 763298).
869
870 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000871 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
872 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
873 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000874
875 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
876
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000877Library
878-------
879
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000880- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
881
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000882- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
883 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
884 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
885 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
886 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
887 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
888 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
889 or Tester().
890
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000891- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
892 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
893 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
894 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
895 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
896 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
897 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
898 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
899 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000900
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000901 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000902
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000903- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
904 weren't before was an oversight.
905
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000906- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
907 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
908
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000909- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
910 when there are no lines.
911
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000912- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
913 which could occur with Tk 8.4
914
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000915- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
916 to child processes.
917
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000918- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
919
920- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
921
922- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
923 xmlrpclib.
924
925- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
926 responses.
927
928- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
929 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
930
931- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
932 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
933 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
934
935- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
936 used as patterns.
937
938- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
939 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
940 than Tk 8.3.
941
942- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
943
944- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000945
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000946Tools/Demos
947-----------
948
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000949- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
950
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000951- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
952
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000953- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000954
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000955Build
956-----
957
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000958- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
959
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000960- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
961
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000962- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
963 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000964
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000965- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
966 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
967 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000968
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000969C API
970-----
971
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000972- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
973 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
974
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000975Windows
976-------
977
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000978- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
979 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
980 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
981 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
982 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
983 Python exception ::
984
985 thread.error: can't start new thread
986
987 is raised now.
988
989- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
990 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
991 instead of from DLL teardown.
992
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000993Mac
994---
995
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000996- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000997 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000998 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
999 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1000 the executable in the bundle.
1001
1002- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001003
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001004- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1005
1006- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1007 on Panther.
1008
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001009What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1010================================
1011
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001012*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001013
1014Core and builtins
1015-----------------
1016
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001017- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1018 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1019 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1020 with the -i option.
1021
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001022- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1023 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1024
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001025- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1026 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1027
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001028- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1029 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1030 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1031 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1032 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1033 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1034 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1035 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1036 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1037 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1038 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1039 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1040 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001041
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001042- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1043 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1044 embedded in a lambda expression.
1045
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001046- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1047 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1048 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1049 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1050 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1051
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001052- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1053 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1054 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1055
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001056- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1057 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1058
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001059- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1060 It's writable again.
1061
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001062- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1063 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1064 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001065 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001066
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001067- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1068 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1069 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1070
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001071Extension modules
1072-----------------
1073
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001074- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1075 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1076
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001077- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1078 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1079 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1080 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1081
1082- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1083 collection.
1084
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001085- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1086 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1087 unique within a single program run.
1088
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001089- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1090 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1091
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001092- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1093 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1094
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001095- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1096 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001097
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001098- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1099
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001100- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1101 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1102
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001103- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1104 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1105 for many BSD-derived systems.
1106
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001107
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001108Library
1109-------
1110
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001111- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1112 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1113 primary ones:
1114
1115 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1116 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1117 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1118
1119 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1120 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1121 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1122 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1123 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1124 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1125
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001126- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1127 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1128 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1129 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1130 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1131 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1132 argument.
1133
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001134- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1135 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1136 in the archive.
1137
1138- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1139 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1140
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001141- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1142 569574).
1143
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001144- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1145 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1146 no more.
1147
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001148- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1149 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1150 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1151 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1152 code coverage.
1153
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001154- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1155 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1156 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001157 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1158 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001159
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001160- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1161 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1162 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001163 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001164
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001165- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1166
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001167- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1168 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1169 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1170 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1171
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001172- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1173 handling.
1174
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001175- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1176 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1177
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001178- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1179 in socket.py.
1180
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001181- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1182
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001183- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1184 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1185 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1186 opener with proxy support.
1187
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001188- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1189
1190- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1191
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001192Tools/Demos
1193-----------
1194
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001195- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1196
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001197- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1198
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001199- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1200 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001201
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001202- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1203 files.
1204
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001205Build
1206-----
1207
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001208- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001209 different root directory.
1210
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001211C API
1212-----
1213
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001214- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1215 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1216 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1217 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1218 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1219 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1220 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1221 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1222 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1223 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1224
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001225- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1226 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1227 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1228 from Python.
1229
1230
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001231New platforms
1232-------------
1233
1234None this time.
1235
1236Tests
1237-----
1238
1239- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1240 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1241
1242Windows
1243-------
1244
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001245- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1246
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001247- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1248 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1249 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1250 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1251 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1252 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1253 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1254 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1255 that's what it's for.
1256
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001257Mac
1258---
1259
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001260- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1261 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1262 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1263 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001264- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1265 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1266- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001267
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001268SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1269------------------------------------
1270
1271430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1272598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1273622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1274661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1275683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1276697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1277713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1278724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1279727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1280729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1281730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1282731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1283732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1284733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1285735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1286740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1287744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1288745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1289747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1290749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1291751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1292753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1293755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1294757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1295760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1296
1297
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001298What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1299================================
1300
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001301*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001302
1303Core and builtins
1304-----------------
1305
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001306- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1307 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1308
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001309- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1310 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1311 and cannot be strings).
1312
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001313- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1314 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1315 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1316 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1317
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001318- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1319 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1320 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1321 Python itself.
1322
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001323- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1324 the referenced object, if it has one.
1325
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001326- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1327 the thread started at
1328 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1329
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001330- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1331 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1332 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1333 placed on a list index.
1334
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001335- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1336 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1337 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1338 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1339
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001340- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1341 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1342 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1343 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1344 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1345 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1346 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1347
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001348- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1349 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1350 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1351 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1352 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1353
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001354- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1355 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001356
1357- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1358 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1359 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1360 #693195.)
1361
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001362- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1363 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001364
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001365- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001366 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001367 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1368 interpreter executions, would fail.
1369
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001370- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001371 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001372 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001373
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001374Extension modules
1375-----------------
1376
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001377- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1378 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1379 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1380 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1381
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001382- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1383 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1384
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001385- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1386 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1387 and Greg Chapman.)
1388
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001389- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1390 recursively.
1391
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001392- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001393 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1394 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1395 leaks.
1396
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001397- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1398
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001399- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1400 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1401 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1402 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1403 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1404 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1405 #705836.
1406
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001407- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001408 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1409
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001410- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1411 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1412 See SF bug #692416.
1413
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001414- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1415 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1416
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001417- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1418 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1419 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001420
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001421- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001422 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1423 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1424
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001425- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1426 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1427 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1428 timeouts to work properly.
1429
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001430Library
1431-------
1432
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001433- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1434 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1435 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1436 future release.
1437
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001438- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1439 for querying platform dependent features.
1440
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001441- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001442
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001443- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1444 pickle protocol versions.
1445
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001446- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1447 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1448 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1449
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001450- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1451
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001452- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1453 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1454 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1455 modules.
1456
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001457- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1458 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1459 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1460
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001461- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1462 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1463
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001464- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1465 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1466 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1467
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001468- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001469 MS Office extensions.
1470
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001471- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1472 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1473
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001474- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1475 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1476
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001477- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1478 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1479 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1480 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1481 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1482 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1483
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001484- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1485 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1486 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001487
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001488- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1489 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1490 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1491
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001492- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1493
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001494- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1495 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1496 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1497
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001498Tools/Demos
1499-----------
1500
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001501- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1502 See the module docstring for details.
1503
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001504Build
1505-----
1506
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001507- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1508 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001509
1510C API
1511-----
1512
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001513- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1514
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001515- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1516 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1517 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1518
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001519- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1520 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001521
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001522 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1523 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1524 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001525
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001526- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001527 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1528
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001529- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1530 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1531 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001532
1533New platforms
1534-------------
1535
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001536None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001537
1538Tests
1539-----
1540
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001541- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1542 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001543
1544Windows
1545-------
1546
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001547- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1548 function.
1549
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001550- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1551 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001552
1553Mac
1554---
1555
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001556- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1557 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001558
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001559- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1560 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001561
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001562- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1563 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1564 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001565
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001566- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001567 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1568 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001569
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001570- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1571 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001572
1573
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001574What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1575=================================
1576
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001577*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001578
1579Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001580-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001581
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001582- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1583 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1584 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1585
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001586- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1587 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1588 (SF patch #664376.)
1589
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001590- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1591 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1592 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1593 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1594 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1595 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001596 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001597
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001598- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1599 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1600 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1601 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001602 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001603
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001604- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1605 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1606 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1607 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1608 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1609 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1610 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1611 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1612 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1613 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1614 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1615
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001616- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1617 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1618 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1619 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1620 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1621 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1622
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001623- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1624 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1625
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001626- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1627 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1628 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1629 case.)
1630
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001631- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1632 passed as unicode strings.
1633
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001634- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1635 See SF bug #683467.
1636
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001637- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1638 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1639
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001640- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1641
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001642- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1643
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001644- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1645 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1646 arguments.
1647
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001648- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1649 See SF bug #667147.
1650
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001651- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001652 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001653 See SF bug #676155.
1654
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001655- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001656 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001657 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1658 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1659 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1660 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1661 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1662 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001663
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001664Extension modules
1665-----------------
1666
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001667- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1668 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1669 tp_as_number pointer.
1670
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001671- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1672 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1673 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1674 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1675 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1676
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001677- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1678
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001679- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1680
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001681- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001682 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001683 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1684 patch #678531.)
1685
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001686- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1687 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1688
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001689- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1690 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1691
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001692- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1693
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001694- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1695 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1696 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1697
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001698- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1699
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001700- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1701 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1702
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001703- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001704
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001705- datetime changes:
1706
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001707 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1708
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001709 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1710 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1711 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1712 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1713 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1714 now.
1715
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001716 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001717 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1718 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001719
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001720 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001721 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001722 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1723 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1724 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1725 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001726
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001727 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1728 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1729 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001730 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1731
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001732 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1733 by a later example coded by Guido.
1734
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001735 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001736 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1737 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1738 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001739 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1740 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1741
1742 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1743 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1744 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1745 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1746 tzinfo subclass instance.
1747
1748 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1749 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1750 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1751 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1752 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1753 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1754 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1755 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001756
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001757 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1758 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1759 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1760 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1761 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001762 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1763
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001764 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001765
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001766 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1767 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1768 as a naive datetime object.
1769
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001770 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1771 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1772 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1773
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001774 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1775 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1776 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1777 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1778 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1779 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1780 comparison.
1781
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001782 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1783 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1784 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1785 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001786 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001787
1788 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001789
1790 and ::
1791
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001792 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1793
1794 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1795 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1796 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1797 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1798
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001799 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1800 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1801 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1802 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1803 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1804
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001805 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1806 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001807 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1808 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001809
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001810Library
1811-------
1812
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001813- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1814 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1815
1816- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1817 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1818 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1819 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1820 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1821 See PEP 307 for details.
1822
1823- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1824 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1825
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001826- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1827 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001828 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001829 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1830 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001831 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001832
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001833- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1834 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1835
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001836- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1837 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1838 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1839
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001840- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1841
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001842- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1843 exception.
1844
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001845- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1846 class.
1847
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001848- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1849 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1850 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1851
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001852- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1853 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1854
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001855- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001856 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1857 See SF bug #659228.
1858
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001859- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1860 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1861 See SF patch #651082.
1862
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001863- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001864
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001865- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1866 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1867
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001868- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001869 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001870
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001871- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1872 DOS paths from other platforms.
1873
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001874Tools/Demos
1875-----------
1876
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001877- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1878 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1879 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1880 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1881 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1882 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1883 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1884 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1885 example:
1886
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001887 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1888 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001889
1890 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1891
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001892
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001893Build
1894-----
1895
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001896- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1897 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1898 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001899 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1900
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001901 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1902
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001903- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1904 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1905 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1906 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1907 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1908 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1909 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1910 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1911 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1912
1913- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1914 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1915 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1916 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1917
1918- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1919 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1920
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001921C API
1922-----
1923
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001924- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1925 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001926
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001927- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1928 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1929 tp_as_number pointer.
1930
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001931- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1932 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1933 (SF #681367)
1934
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001935- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1936 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1937 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1938 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001939
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001940Tests
1941-----
1942
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001943- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001944 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1945 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1946 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1947 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1948 pydoc.)
1949
1950- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1951
1952- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001953
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001954Windows
1955-------
1956
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001957- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1958 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1959 time).
1960
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001961- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1962 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1963
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001964- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1965 release without strong cryptography.
1966
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001967- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001968 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001969
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001970- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1971 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1972
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001973Mac
1974---
1975
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001976- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1977 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001978
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001979- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1980 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1981 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001982
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001983- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1984 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001985
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001986- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1987 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1988 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1989 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001990
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001991- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001992 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1993 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1994 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001995
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001996
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001997What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001998=================================
1999
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002000*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002001
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002002Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002003--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002004
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002005- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2006
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002007- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2008 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002009 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002010 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002011 a different meaning than before.
2012
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002013- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002014 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002015 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002016
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002017- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002018 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002019 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002020
2021- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2022 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2023 and deallocation.
2024
2025- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2026 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2027
2028- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2029 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2030 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2031 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2032 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2033
2034- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2035 now detected by the garbage collector.
2036
2037- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2038 [SF bug 519621]
2039
2040- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2041 identifier.
2042
2043- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2044 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2045 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2046 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2047 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2048 [SF bug 563060]
2049
2050- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2051 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2052 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2053 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2054 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2055
2056- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2057 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2058 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2059
2060- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2061
2062- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2063 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2064 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2065 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2066 state of the slots would be lost.)
2067
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002068Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002069-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002070
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002071- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002072 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2073 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2074 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2075 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002076 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2077 Jython 2.1.
2078
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002079- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002080 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002081 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2082 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2083 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2084 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2085 these, see PEP 302.
2086
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002087- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2088 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2089 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2090
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002091- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2092 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2093 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2094
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002095- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2096 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2097 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2098
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002099- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2100 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2101 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2102 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2103 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2104 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2105 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2106 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2107 releases or implementations.
2108
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002109- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002110 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2111 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002112
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002113- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2114 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2115
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002116- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2117 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2118 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2119
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002120- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2121 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2122
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002123- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2124 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002125 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2126 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002127
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002128- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2129 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2130 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2131 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2132 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2133
2134 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2135 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2136 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2137 pattern.
2138
2139 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2140 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2141 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2142 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2143
2144 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2145 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2146 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2147 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2148 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2149 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2150
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002151- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2152 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2153 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2154 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2155 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2156 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2157 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2158 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002159
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002160- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2161 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2162 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2163 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2164 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002165 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2166 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2167 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2168 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2169 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2170 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2171 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002172
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002173- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2174 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2175
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002176- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2177 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2178 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2179 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2180 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2181 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2182 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2183 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2184 to Zack Weinberg!
2185
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002186- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2187 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2188 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2189 type. This has been fixed now.
2190
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002191- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2192 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2193 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2194
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002195- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2196 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2197 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2198 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2199 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2200 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2201 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2202 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002203 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002204
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002205- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2206 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2207 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002208
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002209- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2210 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2211 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2212 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2213 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2214 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2215 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2216 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002217 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002218 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2219 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2220
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002221- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2222 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2223 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2224 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2225 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2226 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2227 this.)
2228
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002229- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2230 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002231 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002232 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002233 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2234 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002235 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2236 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002237
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002238- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2239 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2240 currently running.
2241
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002242- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2243 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2244 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2245 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2246
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002247- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2248 as directory names.
2249
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002250- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2251 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2252
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002253- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2254 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2255
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002256- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002257 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2258 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002259
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002260- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2261 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2262 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2263 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2264 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2265
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002266- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2267 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2268 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2269 removed.
2270
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002271- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2272 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2273 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2274
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002275- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2276 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2277 to __debug__.
2278
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002279- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2280 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2281 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2282
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002283- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2284 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2285 deprecated now.
2286
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002287- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2288 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2289 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002290
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002291- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2292 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2293 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2294 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2295 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002296
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002297- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2298 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2299
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002300- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2301 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2302 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002303 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002304 is backward compatible.
2305
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002306- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2307 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2308 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2309 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2310 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2311
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002312- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2313 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2314 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2315 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2316 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2317 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002318
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002319- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2320 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2321
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002322- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2323 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2324
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002325- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2326 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2327 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2328 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2329 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2330
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002331- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2332 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2333 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2334
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002335- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002336 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2337
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002338- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2339 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2340 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002341
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002342- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2343 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2344
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002345- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2346 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2347 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2348
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002349- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2350
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002351Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002352-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002353
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002354- Added three operators to the operator module:
2355 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2356 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2357 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2358
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002359- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2360
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002361- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2362 archives.
2363
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002364- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2365 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2366 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2367
2368 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2369
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002370- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2371 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2372 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002373 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002374
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002375- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2376 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2377 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2378 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002379 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2380 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2381 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2382 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002383
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002384- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2385 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002386
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002387- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2388
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002389- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2390 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2391
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002392- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2393 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2394 supported.
2395
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002396- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2397
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002398- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2399 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002400
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002401- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2402 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2403
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002404- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2405
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002406- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2407 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2408
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002409- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2410 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2411 functions but callable type objects.
2412
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002413- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002414 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002415 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002416
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002417- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2418 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002419
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002420- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2421 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002422
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002423- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2424 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2425 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2426 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2427
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002428- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2429 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002430
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002431- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2432 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2433 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2434 and __imul__.
2435
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002436- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002437 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2438 is called.
2439
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002440- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2441 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2442 interpreter was compiled.
2443
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002444- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2445 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2446 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002447 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002448 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2449 1, not 2.
2450
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002451- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2452 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2453 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2454 limit.
2455
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002456- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2457 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2458 bug #623464.
2459
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002460- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2461 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2462 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2463 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2464
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002465Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002466-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002467
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002468- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2469
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002470- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2471 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2472 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2473 with Python 2.3a2.
2474
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002475- os.path exposes getctime.
2476
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002477- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002478 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002479 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002480 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002481 unit tests of floating point results.
2482
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002483- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2484 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2485 has been increased.
2486
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002487- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2488 executed.
2489
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002490- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2491 postinstallation script.
2492
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002493- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2494 test the current module.
2495
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002496- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002497 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2498 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2499 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2500 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2501
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002502- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002503 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002504 Ward's Optik package.
2505
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002506- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2507 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2508 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2509 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2510
2511- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2512 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002513 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002514
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002515- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2516 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2517 shelf are binary pickles.
2518
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002519- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2520 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2521
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002522- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2523 modules are iterators now.
2524
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002525- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2526 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2527 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2528 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2529 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2530 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002531
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002532- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2533 with their entity value.
2534
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002535- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2536
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002537- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2538 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002539
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002540- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2541 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002542 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002543
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002544- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2545 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2546 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2547 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2548 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2549 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2550 main():
2551
2552 import locale
2553 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2554
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002555- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2556 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2557
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002558- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2559 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2560 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2561 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2562 to the new standard.
2563
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002564- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2565 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2566 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2567 an extension to the database.
2568
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002569- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2570 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2571 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2572 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002573 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002574
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002575- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002576 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002577
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002578- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2579 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2580 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2581 bounded integers.
2582
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002583- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2584 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2585 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2586 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2587 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2588 in existence.
2589
2590 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2591 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2592 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2593 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2594 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2595 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2596
2597 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2598 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2599 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2600 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2601
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002602- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2603 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2604 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2605
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002606- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2607
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002608- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2609 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2610 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2611 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2612
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002613- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2614 argument.
2615
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002616- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2617 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2618 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2619 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2620 [SF patch 560794].
2621
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002622- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2623 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2624 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002625 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2626 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2627 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002628
2629- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2630 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002631
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002632- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2633 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2634 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2635 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002636
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002637- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2638 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2639 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2640 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2641 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2642
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002643- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002644
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002645- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2646
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002647- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2648 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2649 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2650 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2651 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2652 identical to None.
2653
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002654- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2655 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2656 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2657 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2658 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2659 results now.
2660
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002661- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2662 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2663
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002664- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2665 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2666 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2667 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2668 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2669 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2670 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2671 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2672
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002673- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2674
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002675- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2676 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2677
2678- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2679 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2680 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2681 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2682 and other systems.
2683
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002684- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2685 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2686 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2687 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 +00002688 work well with these.
2689
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002690- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2691
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002692- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002693 connections.
2694
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002695- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2696 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2697 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2698
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002699- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2700 sets
2701
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002702- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2703 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2704 name.
2705
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002706- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2707 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2708 passed in.
2709
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002710- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002711 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002712 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2713 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002714
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002715- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2716
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002717- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2718
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002719- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2720 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2721 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2722
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002723- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2724 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2725 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2726 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002727 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002728
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002729- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002730 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002731 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002732
2733- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2734 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2735 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2736
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002737- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002738 the value of its expression argument.
2739
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002740- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2741 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2742 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2743
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002744- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2745 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2746 skipstone browser was included.
2747
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002748- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2749 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2750
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002751Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002752-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002753
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002754- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2755 names in addition to accepting file names.
2756
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002757- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2758 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2759 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2760 still used and useful.)
2761
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002762- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2763 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2764 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2765 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002766
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002767- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2768 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2769 the generated binary.
2770
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002771Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002772-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002773
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002774- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2775
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002776- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2777 except in the hands of experts.
2778
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002779- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002780 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2781 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2782 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002783
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002784- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2785 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2786 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2787 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2788 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2789 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2790 builds.
2791
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002792- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2793 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2794 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2795 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2796 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2797 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2798 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2799 new type.
2800
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002801- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002802
2803 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2804 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2805 positive infinities.
2806
2807 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2808 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2809 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2810 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2811 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2812 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2813 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2814
2815 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2816
2817 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2818
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002819- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2820 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2821 size of the executable.
2822
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002823- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2824 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2825 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2826 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002827
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002828- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2829
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002830- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2831 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2832 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002833
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002834- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2835 well as Unix.
2836
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002837- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2838 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2839 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2840 modules in the README file for details.
2841
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002842C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002843-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002844
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002845- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2846 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002847 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002848 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002849 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002850
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002851- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2852 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2853 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2854 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2855 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2856 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002857 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002858 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2859 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2860 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2861 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2862 aligned.)
2863
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002864- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2865 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2866 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2867
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002868- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2869 level.
2870
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002871- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2872 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2873 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2874 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2875 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2876
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002877- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2878 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2879 code.
2880
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002881- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2882 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2883 adjusting for negative indices.
2884
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002885- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2886 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2887 object.
2888
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002889- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2890 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2891 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2892
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002893- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2894 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002895
2896- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2897
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002898- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2899 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2900 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2901 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2902
2903- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2904
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002905- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002906
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002907- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002908 without going through the buffer API.
2909
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002910- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002911
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002912- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2913 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2914 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2915 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2916
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002917- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2918 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2919
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002920- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002921 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2922
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002923New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002924-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002925
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002926- OpenVMS is now supported.
2927
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002928- AtheOS is now supported.
2929
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002930- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2931
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002932- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2933
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002934Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002935-----
2936
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002937- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2938 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2939 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002940
2941Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002942-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002943
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002944- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2945 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2946 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2947 bugs.
2948 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002949 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002950 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2951 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002952 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002953
2954- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002955 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002956
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002957- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2958 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2959
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002960- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2961 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002962 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002963 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2964
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002965- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2966 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2967 use files" uninstall option).
2968
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002969- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2970
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002971- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2972 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2973
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002974- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2975 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2976 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2977
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002978- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2979 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2980 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2981 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2982 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002983 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2984 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2985 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002986
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002987- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002988 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002989 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2990 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2991 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2992 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2993 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2994 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2995 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2996 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2997 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2998 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2999 work around.
3000
3001- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3002 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3003 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3004 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3005 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3006 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3007 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3008 specified with O_CREAT too).
3009
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003010Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003011----
3012
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003013- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003014
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003015- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3016 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3017 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3018
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003019- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3020 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3021 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3022
3023- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3024 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3025 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3026 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3027 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3028 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3029 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3030 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003031
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003032- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3033 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3034 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003035
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003036- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3037 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3038 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3039 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3040 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003041
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003042- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3043 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3044 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003045
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003046- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3047 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003048
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003049- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3050 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3051 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3052 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3053 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003054
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003055- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3056 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3057 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3058
3059- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3060 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3061 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003062
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003063- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3064 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3065 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3066 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003067 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003068
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003069- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3070 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003071
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003072- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3073 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003074
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003075- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003076 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003077 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3078 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003079
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003080
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003081What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003082===============================
3083
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003084*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3085
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003086Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003087--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003088
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003089- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3090 with a custom metaclass.
3091
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003092Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003093-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003094
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003095- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3096 are proxies.
3097
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003098Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003099-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003100
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003101- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3102 very short strings.
3103
3104- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3105 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3106 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3107 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3108 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3109
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003110Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003111-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003112
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003113- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3114 close or delete time).
3115
3116- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3117 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3118
3119- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3120
3121- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003122 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003123
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003124Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003125-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003126
3127Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003128-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003129
3130C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003131-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003132
3133New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003134-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003135
3136Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003137-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003138
3139Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003140-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003141
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003142- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3143
3144- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3145 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3146
3147- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3148 deleted at process exit time.
3149
3150- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3151 in backslash.
3152
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003153Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003154----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003155
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003156- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3157 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3158 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3159
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003160
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003161What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003162===========================
3163
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003164*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3165
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003166Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003167--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003168
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003169- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3170 been extensively updated. See
3171
3172 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3173
3174 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3175
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003176- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3177 deleted!
3178
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003179- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3180 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3181 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3182 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3183 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3184
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003185- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3186
3187 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3188 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3189
3190 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3191 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3192 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3193 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3194 supported anyway.
3195
3196 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3197 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3198
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003199- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3200 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3201 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3202 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3203 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003204
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003205- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3206 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3207 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3208
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003209Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003210-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003211
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003212- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3213 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3214 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3215 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3216 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3217 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003218 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3219 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3220 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3221 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003222
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003223- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3224 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3225 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3226
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003227Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003228-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003229
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003230- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3231
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003232Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003233-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003234
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003235- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3236 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3237 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3238 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3239 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3240 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3241
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003242- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3243
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003244- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3245
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003246- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3247
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003248- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3249 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3250 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3251
3252- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3253
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003254Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003255-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003256
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003257- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3258 off a search on Google.
3259
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003260Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003261-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003262
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003263- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3264 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3265 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3266 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3267 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3268 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3269 other platforms should do likewise.
3270
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003271- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3272 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3273 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3274
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003275C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003276-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003277
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003278- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3279 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3280 producing key-value pairs.
3281
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003282- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003283 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003284 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3285 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3286 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3287 previously went unchallenged.
3288
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003289New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003290-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003291
3292Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003293-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003294
3295Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003296-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003297
3298Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003299----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003300
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003301- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3302 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003303
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003304- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3305 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3306 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3307 home.
3308
3309
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003310What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003311===========================
3312
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003313*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3314
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003315Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003316--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003317
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003318- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3319 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003320
3321 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003322 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003323
3324 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3325 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003326 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003327 This needs to be documented.
3328
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003329- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3330 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3331
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003332- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3333 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3334 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3335
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003336- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3337 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3338
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003339- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3340 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3341 class forbids it).
3342
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003343- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3344 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3345 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3346
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003347- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3348
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003349Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003350-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003351
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003352- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3353 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003354 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003355
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003356- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3357 (like 1 + '').
3358
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003359Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003360-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003361
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003362- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3363 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3364 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3365 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003366 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003367 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3368
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003369- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3370 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3371 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3372 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3373
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003374- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3375 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003376 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3377 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3378 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003379
3380- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3381 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003382
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003383- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3384 bytes on its input.
3385
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003386Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003387-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003388
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003389- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003390 convenience function.
3391
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003392- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3393 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3394 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003395 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3396 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3397 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3398 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3399 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3400 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003401
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003402- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3403 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3404 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3405 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3406
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003407- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3408 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3409 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3410
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003411- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3412 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3413 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3414 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3415
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003416- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3417 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003418 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003419 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3420 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3421 new -l and -e options.
3422
3423- statcache is now deprecated.
3424
3425- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3426 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003427 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003428 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3429 time properly taken into account.
3430
3431- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3432 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3433 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3434 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3435
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003436Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003437-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003438
3439Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003440-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003441
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003442- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3443 is built with libdb3 if available.
3444
3445- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3446
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003447C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003448-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003449
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003450- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3451 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3452 PySequence_Size().
3453
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003454- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3455
3456- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3457 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3458 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3459
3460- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3461 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3462
3463- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3464 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3465
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003466New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003467-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003468
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003469- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3470 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3471
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003472- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3473 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3474
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003475- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3476
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003477Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003478-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003479
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003480- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3481 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3482
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003483Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003484-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003485
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003486Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003487----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003488
3489- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3490 removed completely in the next release.
3491
3492- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3493 OSX.
3494
3495- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3496 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3497
3498- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3499
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003500
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003501What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003502===========================
3503
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003504*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3505
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003506Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003507--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003508
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003509- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003510 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003511 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003512 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3513 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003514 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3515 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003516 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3517 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003518
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003519- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3520 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3521
3522- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3523 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3524
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003525Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003526-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003527
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003528- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3529 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3530 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3531 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3532 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3533 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3534 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3535 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3536
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003537- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3538 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3539 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3540 example).
3541
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003542- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003543 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003544 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003545 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003546
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003547- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3548 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3549 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003550 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003551
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003552- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3553 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3554 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3555 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3556 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3557 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3558
3559 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3560
3561 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3562
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003563Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003564-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003565
3566- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3567
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003568- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3569
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003570- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3571 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003572
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003573- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3574 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3575 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3576 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3577 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3578 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003579 attributes.
3580
3581- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3582 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3583 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003584
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003585- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3586 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3587 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003588
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003589- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3590 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3591 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003592 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3593 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3594
3595- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3596 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003597
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003598Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003599-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003600
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003601- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3602 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3603
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003604- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3605 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3606 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3607 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3608
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003609- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3610 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3611 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3612 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3613
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003614 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3615 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3616 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3617 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3618 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3619 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3620 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3621 without losing information).
3622
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003623- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003624 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3625 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3626 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3627 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3628 module).
3629
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003630 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003631 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3632 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3633 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3634 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003635
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003636- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003637 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3638 encoding.
3639
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003640- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3641 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3642
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003643- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003644 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3645
3646- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3647 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3648 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3649 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3650
3651- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3652
3653- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3654 ON, and OFF.
3655
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003656- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3657 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3658
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003659Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003660-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003661
3662- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3663 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3664 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003665
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003666- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3667 been added: -X and -E.
3668
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003669Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003670-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003671
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003672- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3673 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3674
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003675C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003676-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003677
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003678- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3679 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3680 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3681 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3682 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3683
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003684- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3685 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3686 as long) arguments.
3687
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003688- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3689 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3690 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3691 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3692 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3693 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3694
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003695- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3696 input.
3697
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003698New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003699-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003700
3701Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003702-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003703
3704Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003705-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003706
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003707- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3708 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3709 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3710
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003711- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3712 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3713 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003714 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003715
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003716 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3717 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3718 import signal
3719 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003720
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003721 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003722 while 1:
3723 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003724 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003725 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3726 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3727 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3728 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003729
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003730
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003731What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3732===========================
3733
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003734*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3735
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003736Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003737--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003738
3739- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3740 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3741 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3742
3743- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3744 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3745 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3746 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3747 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3748 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3749 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003750
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003751- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003752 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003753 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3754 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3755 associate a docstring with a property.
3756
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003757- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3758 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3759 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3760 other built-in object types.
3761
3762- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3763 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3764 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3765 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3766 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3767
3768- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3769 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3770
3771- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3772 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003773 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003774 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3775 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3776 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3777 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3778 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3779
3780- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3781 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3782 class.
3783
3784- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3785 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3786 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3787 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3788
3789- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3790 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3791 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3792 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3793
3794- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3795 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3796
3797- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3798 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3799 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3800 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3801 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003802 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003803 with the same value as s.
3804
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003805- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3806
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003807Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003808----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003809
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003810- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3811
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003812- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3813 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3814 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3815 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3816 objects.
3817
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003818- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3819 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003820 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3821 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3822
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003823- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3824 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3825 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3826
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003827Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003828-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003829
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003830- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3831 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3832 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3833 by the instances.
3834
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003835- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3836 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3837 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3838
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003839- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3840 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3841 before the entire comparison is complete.
3842
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003843- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3844 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3845 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3846
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003847- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3848 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3849 getwriter().
3850
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003851- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3852 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3853
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003854- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003855 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3856 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3857
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003858- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3859 iterable object.
3860
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003861- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3862 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003863
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003864- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3865 authentication.
3866
3867- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3868 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003869
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003870- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003871 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3872 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3873 a sample driver.)
3874
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003875Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003876-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003877
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003878- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3879 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3880 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3881 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3882 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3883 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3884 kernel has large file support.
3885
3886- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3887 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3888 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3889 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3890 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3891
3892- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3893 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3894 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3895
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003896C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003897-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003898
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003899- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3900 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3901
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003902New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003903-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003904
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003905- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3906 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3907
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003908Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003909-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003910
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003911- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3912 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3913 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3914 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3915 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3916
3917- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3918 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3919 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3920 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3921
3922- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3923 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3924
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003925Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003926-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003927
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003928- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003929 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3930 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003931
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003932
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003933What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3934===========================
3935
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003936*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3937
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003938Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003939----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003940
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003941- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3942 big to represent as a C double.
3943
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003944- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3945 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3946 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3947 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3948 restriction).
3949
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003950- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3951 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3952 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3953 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3954 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3955
3956 >>> dir([])
3957 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3958 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3959 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3960 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3961 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3962 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3963 'reverse', 'sort']
3964
3965 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3966
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003967- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003968 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3969 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3970 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3971 OverflowError exception.
3972
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003973- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003974 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003975 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3976 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3977 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3978 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3979 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003980 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003981 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3982 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3983
3984 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3985 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3986 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3987 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003988
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003989- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003990 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3991 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3992 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3993 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3994 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3995 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3996 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3997 once it is created.
3998
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003999- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4000 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4001 (key, value) pairs.
4002
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004003- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004004 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4005 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4006
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004007- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4008 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4009 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4010 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4011 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004012
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004013- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004014 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4015 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4016
4017 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4018
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004019- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004020 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4021
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004022Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004023-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004024
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004025- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004026 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4027 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004028
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004029- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4030 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4031 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4032 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4033 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4034 in this area anymore).
4035
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004036- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4037 threading.Timer.
4038
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004039- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4040 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4041
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004042- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004043 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4044
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004045- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004046 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4047 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4048 converted to Python longs.
4049
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004050- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004051 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4052
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004053- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4054 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4055 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4056
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004057Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004058-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004059
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004060- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4061 division operators as per PEP 238.
4062
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004063Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004064-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004065
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004066- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4067 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4068 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4069 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4070
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004071C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004072-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004073
4074- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004075
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004076- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4077 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004078 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004079
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004080 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4081 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004082 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004083 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004084
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004085- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004086 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4087 module:
4088
4089 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004090
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004091 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4092 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004093
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004094 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4095 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004096
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004097 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4098
4099 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4100
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004101- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004102 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4103 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4104 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004105
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004106New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004107-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004108
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004109- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4110 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4111 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4112 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4113 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004114
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004115Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004116-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004117
4118Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004119-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004120
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004121- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4122 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4123 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4124 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004125 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4126 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4127 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4128 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4129 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004130
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004131- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004132 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4133
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004134
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004135What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4136===========================
4137
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004138*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4139
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004140Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004141-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004142
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004143- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4144 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4145
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004146- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4147 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4148 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004149
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004150- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4151 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4152 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4153 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004154
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004155- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4156
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004157- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004158
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004159Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004160-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004161
4162- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004163 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004164 the module docstring for details.
4165
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004166Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004167-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004168
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004169- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004170 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4171 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4172 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004173
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004174- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4175 Nick Mathewson.
4176
4177Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004178----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004179
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004180- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4181 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4182 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4183 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4184 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4185 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4186 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4187 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4188
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004189- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4190 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4191 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4192 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4193
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004194- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4195 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4196 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4197 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4198 come a long way).
4199
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004200- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4201 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4202 write filters for these warnings).
4203
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004204- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4205 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4206 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4207 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4208 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4209
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004210- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4211 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4212 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4213 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4214 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4215 older distribution.
4216
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004217Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004218-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004219
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004220- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4221 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004222 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004223
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004224- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4225 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4226 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4227
4228- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4229
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004230- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4231
4232- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4233
4234- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4235
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004236- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004237
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004238- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4239
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004240New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004241-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004242
4243C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004244-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004245
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004246- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4247 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4248 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4249 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4250 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4251 against buffer overruns.
4252
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004253- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004254 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4255 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004256 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4257 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4258 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4259
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004260- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4261 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4262 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4263 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4264 deprecated.
4265
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004266Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004267-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004268
4269- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4270 relevant is found.
4271
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004272
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004273What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004274===========================
4275
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004276*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4277
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004278Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004280
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004281- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4282 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4283 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4284 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4285 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4286 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4287 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4288 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004289 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004290 repaired.
4291
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004292- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004293 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004294 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4295 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4296 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4297 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4298 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4299 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4300 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4301 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4302
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004303- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4304 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4305 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4306 leading BMO character).
4307
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004308- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4309 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4310 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4311
4312 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4313 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4314 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004315
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004316 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4317 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4318 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4319 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4320 for various simple to use conversions.
4321
4322 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4323 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4324
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004325 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4326 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4327 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4328 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4329 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4330 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4331 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4332 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4333 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4334 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4335 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4336 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4337 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4338 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4339 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004340
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004341- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4342 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4343 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004344 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004345 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004346
4347 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004348 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4349 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4350 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4351 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4352 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004353 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4354 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004355
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004356 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4357 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4358 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004359 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004360
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004361- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4362 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4363 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4364 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4365 floating arithmetic,
4366
4367 x = 9007199254740992.0
4368 print long(x)
4369
4370 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4371 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4372 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4373 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4374 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4375 functions are of good quality).
4376
4377 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4378 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4379 algorithms to break.
4380
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004381- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4382 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4383 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4384 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4385 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4386 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4387 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4388 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4389 order.
4390
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004391- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4392 operation along the most common code paths.
4393
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004394- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4395 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4396
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004397- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4398 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4399 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4400 {}.update(UserDict())
4401
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004402- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4403 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4404 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4405 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4406 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4407 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4408 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4409 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4410
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004411- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004412 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004413
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004414 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004415 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4416 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004417 join() method of strings
4418 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004419 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4420 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004421 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004422 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004423
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004424- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4425 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4426
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004427- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4428 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4429
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004430- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4431 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4432 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4433 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4434
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004435- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4436 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004437 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004438 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4439 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004440
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004441- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4442
4443
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004444Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004445-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004446
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004447- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004448 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004449 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4450 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4451
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004452- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4453 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4454
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004455- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4456 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4457 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4458 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4459
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004460- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4461 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4462 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4463
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004464- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4465
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004466- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4467
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004468- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4469 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4470 that are still imported into string.py).
4471
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004472- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4473
4474- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4475 Now it does.
4476
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004477- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4478
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004479- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4480 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4481 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4482 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4483 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004484 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4485 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004486
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004487- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4488 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4489 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4490 'help(object)'.
4491
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004492Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004493-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004494
4495- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004496 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004497 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4498 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4499
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004500- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004501 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4502 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004503
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004504C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004505-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004506
4507- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4508 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004509
4510----
4511
4512**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**