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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
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000015- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
16PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
17
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000018- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
19 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
20 which was missing for no apparent reason.
21
22- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
23 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
24 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
25
26Extension modules
27-----------------
28
29Library
30-------
31
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000032- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
33 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
34 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
35
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +000036- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
37 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
38 instead of unsigned.
39
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +000040- decimal.py now only uses signals in the spec. The other conditions are
41 no longer part of the public API.
42
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +000043- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
44 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
45 string methods of the same name).
46
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +000047- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
48 SF patch 982681.
49
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +000050- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
51 SF patch 945642.
52
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000053Tools/Demos
54-----------
55
56Build
57-----
58
59C API
60-----
61
62New platforms
63-------------
64
65Tests
66-----
67
68Windows
69-------
70
71Mac
72---
73
74
75
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000076What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
77=================================
78
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +000079*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +000080
81Core and builtins
82-----------------
83
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +000084- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
85 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
86 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
87 objects now (one object instead of three).
88
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +000089- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
90 Windows DLLs.
91
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +000092- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
93
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +000094- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
95 a new .pyc magic.
96
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +000097- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
98 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
99 be there.
100
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000101- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
102 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
103 the LC_NUMERIC category.
104
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000105- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
106 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
107 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
108
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000109- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
110
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000111- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
112 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
113 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000114
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000115- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
116 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
117
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000118- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
119
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000120- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000121 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000122
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000123- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
124
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000125- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
126
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000127- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
128 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
129
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000130- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
131 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
132 Fixes bug #858016 .
133
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000134- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
135 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
136 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
137
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000138- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
139 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
140 improves their performance (about 35%).
141
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000142- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
143 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
144 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
145
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000146- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
147 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
148 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
149 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
150
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000151- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
152 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
153 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
154 length is not known).
155
156- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
157 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000158 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
159 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000160 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
161
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000162- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
163 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
164
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000165- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
166 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
167 keyword arguments.
168
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000169- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
170 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
171 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
172
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000173- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
174 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
175 cases.
176
177- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
178 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
179 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
180 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
181 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
182 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
183 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
184 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
185 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
186 a release build.
187
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000188- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
189 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
190
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000191- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000192 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000193
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000194- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
195 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
196 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
197 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
198 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
199 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
200 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
201 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
202 destroyed.
203
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000204- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
205 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
206 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
207 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
208 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
209 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
210 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
211 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
212
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000213- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
214 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
215 character other than a space.
216
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000217- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
218 by the function object or by the method object, the function
219 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
220 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
221 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
222 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
223 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
224 attributes with the same name.
225
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000226- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
227 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
228 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
229 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
230 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
231 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
232 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
233 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
234 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
235 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
236 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
237 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
238 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
239 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000240
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000241- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
242 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
243 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
244 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
245 This has been repaired.
246
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000247- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
248
249- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
250
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000251- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
252 over a sequence.
253
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000254- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000255 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000256
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000257- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
258
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000259- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
260 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
261 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
262 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
263 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
264 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
265 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
266 records with equal keys is unchanged).
267
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000268- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
269 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
270 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
271
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000272- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
273 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
274 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
275 freelist.
276
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000277- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
278 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
279
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000280- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
281 number.
282
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000283- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
284 a TypeError exception.
285
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000286- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
287 820195.
288
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000289- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
290 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
291 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
292
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000293- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000294 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
295 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000296
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000297- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
298 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
299 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
300
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000301- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
302 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000303 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000304
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000305- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000306 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
307 the first call.
308
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000309
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000310Extension modules
311-----------------
312
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000313- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
314 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
315
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000316- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
317 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
318 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
319 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
320 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
321 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
322 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000323
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000324- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
325
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000326- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
327
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000328- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
329 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
330
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000331- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
332 fewer false positives.
333
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000334- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
335 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
336
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000337- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000338 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
339
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000340- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000341 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000342 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
343 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
344 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000345
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000346- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
347 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
348 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
349 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
350
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000351- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
352 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
353 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
354 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
355 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
356 #897625.
357
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000358- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
359 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
360
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000361- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
362 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
363 and pops on either side of the deque.
364
365- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
366 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
367
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000368- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
369 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
370 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
371 other functions that expect a function argument.
372
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000373- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
374
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000375- os.getsid was added.
376
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000377- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
378 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
379 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
380
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000381- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
382
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000383- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
384
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000385- readline.clear_history was added.
386
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000387- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
388
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000389- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
390
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000391- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
392
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000393- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
394
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000395- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
396
397- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
398
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000399- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
400
401- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
402
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000403- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
404 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
405 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
406
407- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
408 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
409 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
410 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
411 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
412 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
413 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
414
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000415- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
416 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
417 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
418 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000419
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000420- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000421 iterators from a single iterable.
422
423- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
424 of raising a TypeError exception.
425
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000426- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
427 as parameter.
428
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000429Library
430-------
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000431
432- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
433 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
434 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000435
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000436- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
437 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
438 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000439
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000440- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000441
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000442- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
443 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000444
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000445- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
446 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
447
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000448- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
449
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000450- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000451 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000452
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000453- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
454 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
455
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000456- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
457
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000458- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
459 on cygwin and mingw32.
460
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000461- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
462
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000463- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
464 module.
465
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000466- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
467 installation scheme for all platforms.
468
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000469- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000470 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000471
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000472- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
473 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
474 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
475
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000476- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
477 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
478 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
479
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000480- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
481
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000482- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
483
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000484- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
485 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
486
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000487- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
488 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
489 type pattern with the same value exists.
490
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000491- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
492 when run from the command prompt).
493
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000494- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
495 not taken into consideration when caching value.
496
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000497- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
498 default sort).
499
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000500- Added global runctx function to profile module
501
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000502- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
503
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000504- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
505
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000506- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
507
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000508- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000509 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
510 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
511 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
512 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
513 accordingly.
514
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000515- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
516 decoding standards.
517
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000518- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
519 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
520 called for all requests.
521
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000522- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
523 they are passed to the compiler.
524
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000525- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
526 indent, width and depth.
527
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000528- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
529 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
530
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000531- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
532 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
533
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000534- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
535
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000536- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
537
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000538- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
539
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000540- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
541 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
542
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000543- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000544 for better performance.
545
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000546- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000547
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000548- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
549 a string).
550
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000551- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
552
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000553- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
554
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000555- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
556
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000557- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
558
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000559- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
560 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
561 list of fieldnames.
562
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000563- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
564 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
565
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000566- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
567
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000568- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
569 empty lists.
570
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000571- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
572 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
573 and shelves.
574
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000575- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
576 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
577
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000578- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000579 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
580 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000581
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000582- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
583 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000584 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000585
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000586- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000587 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
588 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
589
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000590- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
591 and removed in Py2.4.
592
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000593- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
594
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000595- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
596
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000597Tools/Demos
598-----------
599
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000600- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
601 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
602
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000603- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
604
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000605- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
606 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
607 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
608 destination in situations where both files are given.
609
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000610- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
611 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
612 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
613 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
614
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000615- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
616
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000617- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
618 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
619 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
620 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
621 now.
622
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000623- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
624 in effect
625
626- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
627 C-c C-h
628
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000629- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
630 -d option was given.
631
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000632Build
633-----
634
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000635- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
636 build under OS X.
637
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000638- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
639 --enable-profiling.
640
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000641- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
642 is configured --with-tsc.
643
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000644- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
645 on AMD64.
646
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000647- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
648 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
649
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000650- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
651 removed.
652
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000653- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
654 supported (see PEP 11).
655
656- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
657
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000658- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
659
660- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
661 (see PEP 11).
662
663- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
664 sizeof(char) must be 1.
665
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000666C API
667-----
668
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000669- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
670 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
671 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
672
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000673- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
674 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
675 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
676 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
677
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000678- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
679 generator objects.
680
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000681- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
682 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000683 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
684 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000685
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000686- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
687 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
688
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000689- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
690 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
691 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
692 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
693 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
694
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000695- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
696 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
697 about 10% faster.
698
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000699- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
700 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
701
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000702- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
703 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
704 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
705 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
706
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000707Windows
708-------
709
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000710- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
711 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
712 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
713 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
714
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000715- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
716 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
717 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
718
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000719
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000720What's New in Python 2.3 final?
721===============================
722
723*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
724
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000725IDLE
726----
727
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000728- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
729 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
730 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
731 context-menu actions.
732
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000733- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
734 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
735 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
736 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
737 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
738 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
739 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
740 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
741 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
742
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000743
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000744What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
745=============================================
746
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000747*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000748
749Core and builtins
750-----------------
751
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000752- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000753 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000754 comment at the end are still unsupported.
755
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000756Extension modules
757-----------------
758
759- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
760 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
761 than once. This has been fixed.
762
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000763- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
764 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
765 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
766 call.
767
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000768- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
769
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000770Library
771-------
772
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000773- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
774 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
775
776- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
777 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
778 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
779 restored.
780
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000781IDLE
782----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000783
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000784- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000785
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000786Build
787-----
788
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000789- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
790 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
791
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000792C API
793-----
794
795Windows
796-------
797
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000798- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
799 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
800
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000801- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
802
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000803Mac
804---
805
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000806- Various fixes to pimp.
807
808- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
809
810- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
811 more problems than it solves.
812
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000813
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000814What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
815=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000816
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000817*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
818
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000819Core and builtins
820-----------------
821
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000822- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
823 by sys.setcheckinterval().
824
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000825- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
826 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000827 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000828
829- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
830 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
831 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000832 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000833
834- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
835 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000836
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000837- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
838 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
839 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
840
841- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000842 770247.
843
844- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000845
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000846Extension modules
847-----------------
848
849- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
850 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
851
852- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
853
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000854- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
855
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000856- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
857 contained within the _strptime module.
858
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000859- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
860 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
861
862- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000863 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
864
865- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
866 the find_class attribute, if present.
867
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000868- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000869
870 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
871 (SF bug 763298).
872
873 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000874 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
875 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
876 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000877
878 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
879
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000880Library
881-------
882
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000883- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
884
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000885- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
886 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
887 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
888 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
889 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
890 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
891 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
892 or Tester().
893
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000894- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
895 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
896 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
897 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
898 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
899 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
900 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
901 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
902 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000903
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000904 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000905
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000906- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
907 weren't before was an oversight.
908
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000909- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
910 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
911
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000912- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
913 when there are no lines.
914
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000915- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
916 which could occur with Tk 8.4
917
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000918- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
919 to child processes.
920
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000921- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
922
923- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
924
925- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
926 xmlrpclib.
927
928- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
929 responses.
930
931- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
932 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
933
934- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
935 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
936 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
937
938- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
939 used as patterns.
940
941- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
942 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
943 than Tk 8.3.
944
945- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
946
947- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000948
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000949Tools/Demos
950-----------
951
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000952- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
953
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000954- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
955
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000956- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000957
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000958Build
959-----
960
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000961- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
962
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000963- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
964
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000965- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
966 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000967
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000968- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
969 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
970 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000971
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000972C API
973-----
974
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000975- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
976 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
977
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000978Windows
979-------
980
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000981- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
982 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
983 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
984 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
985 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
986 Python exception ::
987
988 thread.error: can't start new thread
989
990 is raised now.
991
992- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
993 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
994 instead of from DLL teardown.
995
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000996Mac
997---
998
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000999- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001000 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001001 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1002 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1003 the executable in the bundle.
1004
1005- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001006
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001007- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1008
1009- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1010 on Panther.
1011
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001012What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1013================================
1014
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001015*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001016
1017Core and builtins
1018-----------------
1019
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001020- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1021 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1022 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1023 with the -i option.
1024
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001025- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1026 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1027
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001028- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1029 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1030
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001031- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1032 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1033 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1034 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1035 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1036 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1037 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1038 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1039 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1040 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1041 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1042 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1043 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001044
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001045- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1046 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1047 embedded in a lambda expression.
1048
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001049- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1050 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1051 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1052 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1053 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1054
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001055- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1056 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1057 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1058
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001059- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1060 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1061
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001062- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1063 It's writable again.
1064
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001065- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1066 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1067 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001068 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001069
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001070- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1071 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1072 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1073
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001074Extension modules
1075-----------------
1076
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001077- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1078 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1079
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001080- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1081 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1082 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1083 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1084
1085- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1086 collection.
1087
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001088- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1089 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1090 unique within a single program run.
1091
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001092- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1093 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1094
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001095- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1096 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1097
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001098- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1099 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001100
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001101- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1102
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001103- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1104 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1105
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001106- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1107 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1108 for many BSD-derived systems.
1109
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001110
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001111Library
1112-------
1113
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001114- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1115 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1116 primary ones:
1117
1118 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1119 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1120 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1121
1122 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1123 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1124 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1125 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1126 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1127 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1128
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001129- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1130 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1131 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1132 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1133 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1134 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1135 argument.
1136
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001137- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1138 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1139 in the archive.
1140
1141- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1142 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1143
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001144- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1145 569574).
1146
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001147- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1148 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1149 no more.
1150
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001151- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1152 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1153 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1154 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1155 code coverage.
1156
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001157- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1158 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1159 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001160 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1161 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001162
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001163- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1164 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1165 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001166 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001167
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001168- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1169
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001170- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1171 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1172 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1173 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1174
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001175- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1176 handling.
1177
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001178- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1179 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1180
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001181- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1182 in socket.py.
1183
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001184- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1185
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001186- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1187 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1188 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1189 opener with proxy support.
1190
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001191- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1192
1193- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1194
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001195Tools/Demos
1196-----------
1197
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001198- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1199
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001200- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1201
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001202- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1203 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001204
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001205- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1206 files.
1207
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001208Build
1209-----
1210
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001211- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001212 different root directory.
1213
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001214C API
1215-----
1216
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001217- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1218 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1219 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1220 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1221 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1222 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1223 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1224 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1225 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1226 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1227
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001228- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1229 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1230 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1231 from Python.
1232
1233
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001234New platforms
1235-------------
1236
1237None this time.
1238
1239Tests
1240-----
1241
1242- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1243 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1244
1245Windows
1246-------
1247
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001248- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1249
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001250- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1251 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1252 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1253 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1254 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1255 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1256 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1257 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1258 that's what it's for.
1259
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001260Mac
1261---
1262
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001263- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1264 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1265 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1266 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001267- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1268 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1269- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001270
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001271SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1272------------------------------------
1273
1274430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1275598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1276622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1277661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1278683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1279697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1280713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1281724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1282727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1283729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1284730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1285731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1286732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1287733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1288735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1289740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1290744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1291745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1292747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1293749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1294751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1295753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1296755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1297757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1298760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1299
1300
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001301What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1302================================
1303
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001304*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001305
1306Core and builtins
1307-----------------
1308
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001309- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1310 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1311
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001312- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1313 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1314 and cannot be strings).
1315
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001316- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1317 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1318 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1319 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1320
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001321- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1322 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1323 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1324 Python itself.
1325
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001326- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1327 the referenced object, if it has one.
1328
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001329- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1330 the thread started at
1331 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1332
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001333- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1334 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1335 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1336 placed on a list index.
1337
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001338- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1339 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1340 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1341 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1342
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001343- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1344 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1345 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1346 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1347 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1348 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1349 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1350
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001351- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1352 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1353 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1354 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1355 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1356
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001357- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1358 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001359
1360- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1361 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1362 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1363 #693195.)
1364
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001365- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1366 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001367
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001368- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001369 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001370 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1371 interpreter executions, would fail.
1372
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001373- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001374 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001375 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001376
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001377Extension modules
1378-----------------
1379
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001380- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1381 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1382 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1383 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1384
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001385- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1386 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1387
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001388- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1389 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1390 and Greg Chapman.)
1391
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001392- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1393 recursively.
1394
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001395- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001396 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1397 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1398 leaks.
1399
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001400- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1401
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001402- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1403 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1404 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1405 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1406 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1407 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1408 #705836.
1409
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001410- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001411 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1412
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001413- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1414 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1415 See SF bug #692416.
1416
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001417- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1418 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1419
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001420- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1421 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1422 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001423
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001424- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001425 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1426 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1427
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001428- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1429 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1430 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1431 timeouts to work properly.
1432
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001433Library
1434-------
1435
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001436- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1437 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1438 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1439 future release.
1440
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001441- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1442 for querying platform dependent features.
1443
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001444- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001445
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001446- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1447 pickle protocol versions.
1448
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001449- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1450 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1451 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1452
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001453- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1454
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001455- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1456 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1457 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1458 modules.
1459
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001460- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1461 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1462 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1463
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001464- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1465 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1466
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001467- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1468 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1469 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1470
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001471- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001472 MS Office extensions.
1473
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001474- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1475 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1476
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001477- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1478 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1479
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001480- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1481 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1482 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1483 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1484 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1485 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1486
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001487- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1488 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1489 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001490
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001491- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1492 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1493 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1494
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001495- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1496
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001497- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1498 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1499 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1500
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001501Tools/Demos
1502-----------
1503
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001504- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1505 See the module docstring for details.
1506
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001507Build
1508-----
1509
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001510- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1511 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001512
1513C API
1514-----
1515
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001516- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1517
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001518- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1519 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1520 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1521
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001522- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1523 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001524
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001525 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1526 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1527 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001528
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001529- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001530 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1531
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001532- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1533 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1534 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001535
1536New platforms
1537-------------
1538
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001539None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001540
1541Tests
1542-----
1543
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001544- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1545 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001546
1547Windows
1548-------
1549
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001550- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1551 function.
1552
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001553- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1554 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001555
1556Mac
1557---
1558
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001559- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1560 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001561
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001562- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1563 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001564
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001565- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1566 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1567 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001568
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001569- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001570 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1571 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001572
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001573- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1574 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001575
1576
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001577What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1578=================================
1579
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001580*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001581
1582Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001583-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001584
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001585- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1586 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1587 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1588
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001589- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1590 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1591 (SF patch #664376.)
1592
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001593- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1594 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1595 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1596 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1597 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1598 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001599 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001600
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001601- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1602 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1603 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1604 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001605 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001606
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001607- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1608 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1609 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1610 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1611 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1612 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1613 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1614 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1615 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1616 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1617 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1618
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001619- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1620 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1621 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1622 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1623 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1624 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1625
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001626- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1627 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1628
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001629- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1630 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1631 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1632 case.)
1633
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001634- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1635 passed as unicode strings.
1636
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001637- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1638 See SF bug #683467.
1639
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001640- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1641 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1642
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001643- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1644
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001645- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1646
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001647- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1648 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1649 arguments.
1650
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001651- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1652 See SF bug #667147.
1653
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001654- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001655 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001656 See SF bug #676155.
1657
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001658- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001659 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001660 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1661 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1662 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1663 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1664 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1665 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001666
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001667Extension modules
1668-----------------
1669
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001670- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1671 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1672 tp_as_number pointer.
1673
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001674- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1675 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1676 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1677 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1678 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1679
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001680- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1681
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001682- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1683
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001684- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001685 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001686 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1687 patch #678531.)
1688
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001689- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1690 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1691
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001692- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1693 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1694
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001695- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1696
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001697- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1698 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1699 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1700
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001701- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1702
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001703- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1704 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1705
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001706- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001707
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001708- datetime changes:
1709
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001710 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1711
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001712 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1713 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1714 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1715 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1716 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1717 now.
1718
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001719 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001720 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1721 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001722
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001723 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001724 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001725 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1726 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1727 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1728 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001729
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001730 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1731 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1732 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001733 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1734
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001735 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1736 by a later example coded by Guido.
1737
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001738 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001739 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1740 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1741 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001742 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1743 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1744
1745 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1746 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1747 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1748 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1749 tzinfo subclass instance.
1750
1751 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1752 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1753 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1754 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1755 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1756 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1757 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1758 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001759
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001760 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1761 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1762 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1763 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1764 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001765 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1766
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001767 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001768
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001769 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1770 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1771 as a naive datetime object.
1772
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001773 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1774 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1775 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1776
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001777 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1778 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1779 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1780 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1781 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1782 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1783 comparison.
1784
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001785 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1786 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1787 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1788 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001789 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001790
1791 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001792
1793 and ::
1794
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001795 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1796
1797 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1798 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1799 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1800 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1801
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001802 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1803 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1804 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1805 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1806 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1807
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001808 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1809 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001810 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1811 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001812
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001813Library
1814-------
1815
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001816- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1817 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1818
1819- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1820 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1821 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1822 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1823 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1824 See PEP 307 for details.
1825
1826- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1827 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1828
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001829- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1830 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001831 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001832 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1833 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001834 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001835
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001836- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1837 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1838
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001839- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1840 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1841 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1842
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001843- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1844
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001845- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1846 exception.
1847
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001848- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1849 class.
1850
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001851- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1852 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1853 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1854
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001855- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1856 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1857
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001858- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001859 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1860 See SF bug #659228.
1861
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001862- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1863 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1864 See SF patch #651082.
1865
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001866- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001867
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001868- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1869 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1870
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001871- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001872 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001873
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001874- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1875 DOS paths from other platforms.
1876
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001877Tools/Demos
1878-----------
1879
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001880- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1881 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1882 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1883 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1884 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1885 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1886 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1887 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1888 example:
1889
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001890 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1891 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001892
1893 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1894
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001895
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001896Build
1897-----
1898
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001899- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1900 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1901 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001902 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1903
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001904 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1905
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001906- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1907 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1908 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1909 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1910 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1911 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1912 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1913 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1914 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1915
1916- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1917 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1918 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1919 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1920
1921- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1922 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1923
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001924C API
1925-----
1926
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001927- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1928 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001929
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001930- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1931 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1932 tp_as_number pointer.
1933
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001934- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1935 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1936 (SF #681367)
1937
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001938- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1939 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1940 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1941 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001942
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001943Tests
1944-----
1945
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001946- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001947 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1948 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1949 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1950 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1951 pydoc.)
1952
1953- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1954
1955- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001956
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001957Windows
1958-------
1959
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001960- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1961 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1962 time).
1963
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001964- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1965 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1966
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001967- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1968 release without strong cryptography.
1969
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001970- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001971 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001972
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001973- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1974 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1975
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001976Mac
1977---
1978
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001979- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1980 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001981
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001982- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1983 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1984 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001985
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001986- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1987 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001988
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001989- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1990 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1991 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1992 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001993
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001994- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001995 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1996 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1997 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001998
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001999
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002000What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002001=================================
2002
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002003*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002004
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002005Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002006--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002007
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002008- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2009
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002010- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2011 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002012 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002013 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002014 a different meaning than before.
2015
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002016- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002017 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002018 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002019
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002020- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002021 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002022 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002023
2024- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2025 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2026 and deallocation.
2027
2028- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2029 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2030
2031- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2032 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2033 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2034 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2035 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2036
2037- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2038 now detected by the garbage collector.
2039
2040- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2041 [SF bug 519621]
2042
2043- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2044 identifier.
2045
2046- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2047 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2048 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2049 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2050 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2051 [SF bug 563060]
2052
2053- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2054 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2055 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2056 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2057 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2058
2059- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2060 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2061 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2062
2063- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2064
2065- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2066 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2067 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2068 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2069 state of the slots would be lost.)
2070
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002071Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002072-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002073
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002074- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002075 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2076 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2077 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2078 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002079 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2080 Jython 2.1.
2081
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002082- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002083 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002084 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2085 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2086 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2087 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2088 these, see PEP 302.
2089
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002090- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2091 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2092 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2093
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002094- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2095 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2096 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2097
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002098- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2099 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2100 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2101
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002102- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2103 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2104 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2105 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2106 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2107 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2108 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2109 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2110 releases or implementations.
2111
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002112- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002113 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2114 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002115
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002116- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2117 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2118
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002119- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2120 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2121 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2122
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002123- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2124 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2125
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002126- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2127 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002128 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2129 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002130
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002131- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2132 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2133 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2134 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2135 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2136
2137 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2138 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2139 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2140 pattern.
2141
2142 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2143 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2144 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2145 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2146
2147 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2148 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2149 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2150 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2151 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2152 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2153
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002154- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2155 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2156 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2157 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2158 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2159 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2160 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2161 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002162
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002163- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2164 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2165 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2166 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2167 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002168 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2169 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2170 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2171 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2172 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2173 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2174 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002175
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002176- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2177 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2178
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002179- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2180 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2181 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2182 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2183 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2184 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2185 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2186 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2187 to Zack Weinberg!
2188
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002189- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2190 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2191 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2192 type. This has been fixed now.
2193
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002194- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2195 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2196 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2197
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002198- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2199 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2200 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2201 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2202 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2203 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2204 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2205 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002206 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002207
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002208- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2209 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2210 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002211
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002212- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2213 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2214 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2215 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2216 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2217 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2218 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2219 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002220 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002221 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2222 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2223
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002224- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2225 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2226 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2227 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2228 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2229 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2230 this.)
2231
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002232- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2233 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002234 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002235 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002236 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2237 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002238 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2239 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002240
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002241- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2242 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2243 currently running.
2244
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002245- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2246 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2247 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2248 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2249
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002250- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2251 as directory names.
2252
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002253- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2254 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2255
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002256- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2257 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2258
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002259- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002260 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2261 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002262
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002263- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2264 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2265 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2266 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2267 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2268
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002269- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2270 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2271 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2272 removed.
2273
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002274- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2275 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2276 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2277
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002278- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2279 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2280 to __debug__.
2281
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002282- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2283 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2284 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2285
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002286- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2287 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2288 deprecated now.
2289
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002290- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2291 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2292 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002293
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002294- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2295 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2296 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2297 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2298 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002299
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002300- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2301 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2302
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002303- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2304 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2305 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002306 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002307 is backward compatible.
2308
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002309- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2310 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2311 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2312 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2313 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2314
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002315- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2316 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2317 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2318 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2319 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2320 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002321
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002322- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2323 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2324
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002325- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2326 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2327
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002328- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2329 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2330 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2331 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2332 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2333
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002334- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2335 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2336 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2337
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002338- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002339 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2340
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002341- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2342 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2343 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002344
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002345- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2346 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2347
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002348- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2349 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2350 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2351
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002352- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2353
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002354Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002355-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002356
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002357- Added three operators to the operator module:
2358 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2359 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2360 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2361
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002362- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2363
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002364- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2365 archives.
2366
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002367- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2368 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2369 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2370
2371 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2372
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002373- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2374 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2375 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002376 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002377
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002378- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2379 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2380 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2381 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002382 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2383 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2384 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2385 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002386
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002387- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2388 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002389
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002390- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2391
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002392- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2393 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2394
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002395- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2396 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2397 supported.
2398
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002399- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2400
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002401- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2402 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002403
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002404- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2405 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2406
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002407- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2408
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002409- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2410 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2411
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002412- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2413 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2414 functions but callable type objects.
2415
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002416- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002417 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002418 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002419
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002420- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2421 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002422
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002423- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2424 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002425
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002426- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2427 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2428 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2429 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2430
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002431- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2432 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002433
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002434- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2435 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2436 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2437 and __imul__.
2438
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002439- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002440 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2441 is called.
2442
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002443- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2444 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2445 interpreter was compiled.
2446
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002447- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2448 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2449 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002450 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002451 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2452 1, not 2.
2453
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002454- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2455 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2456 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2457 limit.
2458
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002459- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2460 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2461 bug #623464.
2462
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002463- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2464 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2465 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2466 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2467
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002468Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002469-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002470
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002471- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2472
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002473- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2474 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2475 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2476 with Python 2.3a2.
2477
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002478- os.path exposes getctime.
2479
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002480- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002481 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002482 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002483 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002484 unit tests of floating point results.
2485
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002486- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2487 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2488 has been increased.
2489
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002490- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2491 executed.
2492
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002493- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2494 postinstallation script.
2495
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002496- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2497 test the current module.
2498
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002499- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002500 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2501 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2502 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2503 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2504
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002505- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002506 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002507 Ward's Optik package.
2508
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002509- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2510 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2511 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2512 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2513
2514- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2515 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002516 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002517
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002518- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2519 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2520 shelf are binary pickles.
2521
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002522- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2523 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2524
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002525- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2526 modules are iterators now.
2527
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002528- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2529 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2530 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2531 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2532 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2533 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002534
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002535- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2536 with their entity value.
2537
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002538- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2539
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002540- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2541 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002542
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002543- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2544 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002545 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002546
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002547- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2548 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2549 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2550 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2551 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2552 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2553 main():
2554
2555 import locale
2556 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2557
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002558- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2559 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2560
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002561- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2562 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2563 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2564 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2565 to the new standard.
2566
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002567- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2568 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2569 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2570 an extension to the database.
2571
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002572- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2573 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2574 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2575 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002576 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002577
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002578- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002579 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002580
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002581- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2582 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2583 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2584 bounded integers.
2585
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002586- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2587 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2588 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2589 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2590 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2591 in existence.
2592
2593 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2594 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2595 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2596 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2597 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2598 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2599
2600 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2601 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2602 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2603 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2604
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002605- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2606 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2607 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2608
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002609- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2610
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002611- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2612 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2613 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2614 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2615
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002616- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2617 argument.
2618
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002619- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2620 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2621 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2622 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2623 [SF patch 560794].
2624
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002625- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2626 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2627 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002628 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2629 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2630 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002631
2632- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2633 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002634
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002635- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2636 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2637 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2638 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002639
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002640- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2641 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2642 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2643 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2644 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2645
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002646- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002647
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002648- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2649
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002650- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2651 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2652 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2653 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2654 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2655 identical to None.
2656
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002657- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2658 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2659 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2660 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2661 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2662 results now.
2663
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002664- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2665 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2666
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002667- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2668 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2669 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2670 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2671 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2672 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2673 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2674 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2675
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002676- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2677
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002678- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2679 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2680
2681- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2682 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2683 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2684 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2685 and other systems.
2686
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002687- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2688 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2689 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2690 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 +00002691 work well with these.
2692
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002693- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2694
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002695- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002696 connections.
2697
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002698- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2699 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2700 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2701
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002702- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2703 sets
2704
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002705- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2706 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2707 name.
2708
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002709- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2710 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2711 passed in.
2712
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002713- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002714 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002715 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2716 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002717
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002718- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2719
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002720- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2721
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002722- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2723 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2724 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2725
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002726- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2727 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2728 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2729 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002730 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002731
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002732- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002733 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002734 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002735
2736- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2737 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2738 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2739
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002740- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002741 the value of its expression argument.
2742
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002743- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2744 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2745 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2746
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002747- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2748 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2749 skipstone browser was included.
2750
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002751- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2752 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2753
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002754Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002755-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002756
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002757- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2758 names in addition to accepting file names.
2759
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002760- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2761 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2762 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2763 still used and useful.)
2764
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002765- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2766 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2767 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2768 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002769
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002770- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2771 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2772 the generated binary.
2773
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002774Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002775-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002776
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002777- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2778
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002779- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2780 except in the hands of experts.
2781
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002782- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002783 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2784 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2785 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002786
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002787- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2788 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2789 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2790 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2791 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2792 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2793 builds.
2794
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002795- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2796 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2797 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2798 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2799 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2800 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2801 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2802 new type.
2803
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002804- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002805
2806 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2807 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2808 positive infinities.
2809
2810 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2811 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2812 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2813 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2814 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2815 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2816 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2817
2818 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2819
2820 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2821
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002822- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2823 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2824 size of the executable.
2825
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002826- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2827 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2828 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2829 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002830
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002831- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2832
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002833- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2834 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2835 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002836
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002837- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2838 well as Unix.
2839
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002840- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2841 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2842 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2843 modules in the README file for details.
2844
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002845C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002846-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002847
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002848- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2849 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002850 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002851 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002852 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002853
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002854- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2855 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2856 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2857 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2858 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2859 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002860 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002861 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2862 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2863 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2864 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2865 aligned.)
2866
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002867- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2868 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2869 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2870
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002871- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2872 level.
2873
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002874- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2875 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2876 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2877 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2878 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2879
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002880- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2881 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2882 code.
2883
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002884- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2885 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2886 adjusting for negative indices.
2887
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002888- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2889 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2890 object.
2891
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002892- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2893 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2894 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2895
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002896- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2897 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002898
2899- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2900
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002901- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2902 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2903 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2904 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2905
2906- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2907
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002908- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002909
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002910- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002911 without going through the buffer API.
2912
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002913- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002914
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002915- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2916 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2917 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2918 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2919
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002920- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2921 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2922
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002923- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002924 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2925
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002926New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002927-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002928
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002929- OpenVMS is now supported.
2930
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002931- AtheOS is now supported.
2932
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002933- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2934
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002935- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2936
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002937Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002938-----
2939
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002940- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2941 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2942 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002943
2944Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002945-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002946
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002947- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2948 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2949 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2950 bugs.
2951 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002952 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002953 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2954 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002955 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002956
2957- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002958 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002959
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002960- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2961 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2962
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002963- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2964 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002965 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002966 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2967
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002968- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2969 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2970 use files" uninstall option).
2971
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002972- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2973
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002974- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2975 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2976
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002977- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2978 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2979 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2980
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002981- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2982 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2983 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2984 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2985 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002986 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2987 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2988 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002989
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002990- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002991 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002992 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2993 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2994 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2995 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2996 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2997 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2998 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2999 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3000 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3001 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3002 work around.
3003
3004- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3005 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3006 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3007 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3008 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3009 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3010 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3011 specified with O_CREAT too).
3012
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003013Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003014----
3015
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003016- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003017
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003018- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3019 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3020 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3021
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003022- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3023 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3024 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3025
3026- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3027 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3028 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3029 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3030 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3031 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3032 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3033 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003034
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003035- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3036 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3037 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003038
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003039- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3040 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3041 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3042 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3043 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003044
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003045- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3046 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3047 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003048
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003049- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3050 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003051
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003052- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3053 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3054 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3055 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3056 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003057
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003058- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3059 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3060 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3061
3062- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3063 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3064 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003065
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003066- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3067 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3068 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3069 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003070 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003071
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003072- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3073 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003074
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003075- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3076 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003077
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003078- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003079 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003080 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3081 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003082
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003083
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003084What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003085===============================
3086
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003087*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3088
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003089Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003090--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003091
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003092- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3093 with a custom metaclass.
3094
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003095Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003096-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003097
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003098- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3099 are proxies.
3100
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003101Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003102-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003103
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003104- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3105 very short strings.
3106
3107- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3108 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3109 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3110 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3111 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3112
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003113Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003114-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003115
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003116- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3117 close or delete time).
3118
3119- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3120 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3121
3122- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3123
3124- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003125 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003126
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003127Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003128-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003129
3130Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003131-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003132
3133C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003134-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003135
3136New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003137-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003138
3139Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003140-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003141
3142Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003143-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003144
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003145- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3146
3147- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3148 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3149
3150- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3151 deleted at process exit time.
3152
3153- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3154 in backslash.
3155
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003156Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003157----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003158
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003159- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3160 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3161 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3162
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003163
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003164What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003165===========================
3166
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003167*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3168
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003169Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003170--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003171
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003172- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3173 been extensively updated. See
3174
3175 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3176
3177 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3178
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003179- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3180 deleted!
3181
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003182- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3183 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3184 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3185 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3186 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3187
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003188- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3189
3190 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3191 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3192
3193 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3194 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3195 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3196 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3197 supported anyway.
3198
3199 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3200 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3201
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003202- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3203 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3204 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3205 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3206 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003207
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003208- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3209 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3210 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3211
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003212Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003213-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003214
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003215- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3216 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3217 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3218 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3219 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3220 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003221 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3222 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3223 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3224 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003225
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003226- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3227 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3228 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3229
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003230Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003231-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003232
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003233- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3234
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003235Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003236-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003237
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003238- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3239 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3240 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3241 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3242 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3243 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3244
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003245- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3246
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003247- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3248
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003249- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3250
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003251- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3252 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3253 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3254
3255- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3256
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003257Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003258-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003259
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003260- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3261 off a search on Google.
3262
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003263Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003264-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003265
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003266- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3267 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3268 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3269 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3270 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3271 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3272 other platforms should do likewise.
3273
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003274- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3275 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3276 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3277
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003278C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003279-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003280
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003281- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3282 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3283 producing key-value pairs.
3284
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003285- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003286 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003287 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3288 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3289 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3290 previously went unchallenged.
3291
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003292New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003293-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003294
3295Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003296-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003297
3298Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003299-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003300
3301Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003302----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003303
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003304- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3305 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003306
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003307- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3308 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3309 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3310 home.
3311
3312
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003313What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003314===========================
3315
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003316*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3317
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003318Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003319--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003320
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003321- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3322 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003323
3324 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003325 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003326
3327 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3328 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003329 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003330 This needs to be documented.
3331
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003332- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3333 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3334
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003335- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3336 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3337 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3338
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003339- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3340 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3341
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003342- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3343 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3344 class forbids it).
3345
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003346- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3347 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3348 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3349
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003350- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3351
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003352Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003353-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003354
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003355- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3356 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003357 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003358
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003359- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3360 (like 1 + '').
3361
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003362Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003363-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003364
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003365- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3366 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3367 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3368 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003369 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003370 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3371
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003372- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3373 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3374 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3375 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3376
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003377- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3378 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003379 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3380 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3381 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003382
3383- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3384 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003385
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003386- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3387 bytes on its input.
3388
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003389Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003390-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003391
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003392- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003393 convenience function.
3394
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003395- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3396 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3397 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003398 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3399 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3400 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3401 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3402 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3403 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003404
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003405- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3406 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3407 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3408 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3409
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003410- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3411 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3412 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3413
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003414- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3415 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3416 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3417 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3418
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003419- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3420 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003421 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003422 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3423 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3424 new -l and -e options.
3425
3426- statcache is now deprecated.
3427
3428- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3429 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003430 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003431 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3432 time properly taken into account.
3433
3434- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3435 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3436 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3437 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3438
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003439Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003440-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003441
3442Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003443-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003444
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003445- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3446 is built with libdb3 if available.
3447
3448- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3449
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003450C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003451-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003452
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003453- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3454 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3455 PySequence_Size().
3456
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003457- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3458
3459- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3460 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3461 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3462
3463- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3464 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3465
3466- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3467 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3468
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003469New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003470-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003471
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003472- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3473 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3474
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003475- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3476 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3477
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003478- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3479
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003480Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003481-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003482
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003483- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3484 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3485
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003486Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003487-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003488
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003489Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003490----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003491
3492- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3493 removed completely in the next release.
3494
3495- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3496 OSX.
3497
3498- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3499 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3500
3501- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3502
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003503
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003504What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003505===========================
3506
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003507*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3508
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003509Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003510--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003511
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003512- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003513 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003514 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003515 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3516 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003517 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3518 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003519 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3520 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003521
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003522- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3523 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3524
3525- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3526 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3527
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003528Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003529-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003530
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003531- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3532 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3533 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3534 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3535 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3536 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3537 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3538 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3539
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003540- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3541 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3542 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3543 example).
3544
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003545- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003546 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003547 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003548 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003549
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003550- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3551 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3552 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003553 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003554
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003555- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3556 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3557 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3558 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3559 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3560 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3561
3562 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3563
3564 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3565
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003566Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003567-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003568
3569- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3570
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003571- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3572
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003573- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3574 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003575
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003576- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3577 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3578 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3579 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3580 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3581 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003582 attributes.
3583
3584- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3585 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3586 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003587
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003588- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3589 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3590 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003591
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003592- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3593 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3594 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003595 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3596 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3597
3598- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3599 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003600
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003601Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003602-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003603
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003604- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3605 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3606
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003607- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3608 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3609 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3610 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3611
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003612- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3613 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3614 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3615 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3616
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003617 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3618 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3619 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3620 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3621 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3622 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3623 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3624 without losing information).
3625
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003626- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003627 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3628 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3629 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3630 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3631 module).
3632
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003633 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003634 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3635 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3636 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3637 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003638
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003639- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003640 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3641 encoding.
3642
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003643- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3644 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3645
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003646- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003647 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3648
3649- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3650 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3651 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3652 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3653
3654- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3655
3656- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3657 ON, and OFF.
3658
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003659- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3660 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3661
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003662Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003663-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003664
3665- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3666 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3667 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003668
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003669- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3670 been added: -X and -E.
3671
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003672Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003673-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003674
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003675- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3676 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3677
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003678C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003679-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003680
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003681- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3682 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3683 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3684 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3685 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3686
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003687- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3688 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3689 as long) arguments.
3690
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003691- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3692 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3693 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3694 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3695 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3696 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3697
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003698- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3699 input.
3700
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003701New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003702-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003703
3704Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003705-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003706
3707Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003708-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003709
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003710- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3711 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3712 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3713
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003714- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3715 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3716 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003717 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003718
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003719 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3720 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3721 import signal
3722 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003723
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003724 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003725 while 1:
3726 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003727 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003728 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3729 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3730 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3731 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003732
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003733
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003734What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3735===========================
3736
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003737*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3738
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003739Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003740--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003741
3742- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3743 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3744 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3745
3746- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3747 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3748 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3749 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3750 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3751 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3752 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003753
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003754- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003755 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003756 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3757 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3758 associate a docstring with a property.
3759
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003760- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3761 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3762 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3763 other built-in object types.
3764
3765- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3766 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3767 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3768 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3769 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3770
3771- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3772 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3773
3774- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3775 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003776 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003777 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3778 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3779 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3780 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3781 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3782
3783- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3784 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3785 class.
3786
3787- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3788 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3789 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3790 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3791
3792- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3793 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3794 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3795 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3796
3797- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3798 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3799
3800- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3801 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3802 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3803 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3804 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003805 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003806 with the same value as s.
3807
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003808- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3809
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003810Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003811----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003812
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003813- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3814
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003815- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3816 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3817 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3818 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3819 objects.
3820
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003821- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3822 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003823 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3824 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3825
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003826- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3827 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3828 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3829
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003830Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003831-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003832
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003833- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3834 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3835 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3836 by the instances.
3837
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003838- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3839 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3840 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3841
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003842- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3843 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3844 before the entire comparison is complete.
3845
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003846- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3847 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3848 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3849
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003850- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3851 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3852 getwriter().
3853
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003854- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3855 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3856
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003857- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003858 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3859 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3860
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003861- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3862 iterable object.
3863
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003864- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3865 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003866
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003867- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3868 authentication.
3869
3870- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3871 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003872
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003873- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003874 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3875 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3876 a sample driver.)
3877
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003878Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003879-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003880
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003881- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3882 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3883 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3884 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3885 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3886 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3887 kernel has large file support.
3888
3889- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3890 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3891 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3892 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3893 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3894
3895- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3896 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3897 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3898
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003899C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003900-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003901
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003902- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3903 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3904
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003905New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003906-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003907
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003908- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3909 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3910
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003911Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003912-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003913
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003914- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3915 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3916 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3917 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3918 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3919
3920- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3921 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3922 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3923 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3924
3925- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3926 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3927
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003928Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003929-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003930
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003931- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003932 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3933 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003934
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003935
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003936What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3937===========================
3938
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003939*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3940
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003941Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003942----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003943
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003944- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3945 big to represent as a C double.
3946
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003947- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3948 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3949 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3950 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3951 restriction).
3952
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003953- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3954 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3955 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3956 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3957 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3958
3959 >>> dir([])
3960 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3961 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3962 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3963 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3964 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3965 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3966 'reverse', 'sort']
3967
3968 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3969
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003970- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003971 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3972 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3973 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3974 OverflowError exception.
3975
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003976- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003977 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003978 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3979 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3980 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3981 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3982 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003983 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003984 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3985 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3986
3987 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3988 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3989 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3990 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003991
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003992- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003993 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3994 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3995 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3996 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3997 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3998 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3999 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4000 once it is created.
4001
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004002- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4003 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4004 (key, value) pairs.
4005
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004006- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004007 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4008 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4009
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004010- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4011 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4012 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4013 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4014 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004015
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004016- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004017 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4018 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4019
4020 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4021
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004022- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004023 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4024
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004025Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004026-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004027
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004028- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004029 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4030 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004031
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004032- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4033 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4034 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4035 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4036 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4037 in this area anymore).
4038
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004039- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4040 threading.Timer.
4041
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004042- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4043 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4044
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004045- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004046 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4047
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004048- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004049 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4050 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4051 converted to Python longs.
4052
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004053- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004054 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4055
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004056- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4057 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4058 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4059
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004060Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004061-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004062
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004063- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4064 division operators as per PEP 238.
4065
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004066Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004067-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004068
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004069- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4070 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4071 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4072 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4073
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004074C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004075-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004076
4077- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004078
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004079- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4080 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004081 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004082
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004083 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4084 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004085 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004086 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004087
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004088- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004089 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4090 module:
4091
4092 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004093
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004094 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4095 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004096
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004097 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4098 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004099
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004100 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4101
4102 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4103
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004104- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004105 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4106 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4107 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004108
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004109New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004110-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004111
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004112- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4113 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4114 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4115 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4116 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004117
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004118Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004119-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004120
4121Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004122-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004123
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004124- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4125 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4126 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4127 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004128 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4129 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4130 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4131 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4132 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004133
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004134- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004135 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4136
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004137
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004138What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4139===========================
4140
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004141*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4142
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004143Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004144-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004145
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004146- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4147 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4148
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004149- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4150 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4151 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004152
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004153- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4154 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4155 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4156 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004157
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004158- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4159
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004160- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004161
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004162Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004163-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004164
4165- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004166 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004167 the module docstring for details.
4168
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004169Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004170-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004171
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004172- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004173 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4174 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4175 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004176
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004177- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4178 Nick Mathewson.
4179
4180Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004181----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004182
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004183- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4184 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4185 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4186 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4187 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4188 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4189 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4190 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4191
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004192- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4193 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4194 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4195 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4196
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004197- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4198 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4199 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4200 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4201 come a long way).
4202
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004203- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4204 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4205 write filters for these warnings).
4206
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004207- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4208 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4209 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4210 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4211 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4212
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004213- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4214 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4215 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4216 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4217 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4218 older distribution.
4219
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004220Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004221-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004222
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004223- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4224 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004225 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004226
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004227- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4228 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4229 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4230
4231- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4232
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004233- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4234
4235- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4236
4237- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4238
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004239- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004240
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004241- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4242
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004243New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004244-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004245
4246C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004247-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004248
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004249- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4250 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4251 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4252 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4253 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4254 against buffer overruns.
4255
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004256- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004257 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4258 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004259 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4260 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4261 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4262
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004263- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4264 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4265 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4266 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4267 deprecated.
4268
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004269Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004270-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004271
4272- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4273 relevant is found.
4274
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004275
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004276What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004277===========================
4278
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4280
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004281Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004282----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004283
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004284- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4285 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4286 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4287 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4288 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4289 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4290 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4291 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004292 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004293 repaired.
4294
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004295- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004296 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004297 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4298 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4299 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4300 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4301 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4302 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4303 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4304 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4305
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004306- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4307 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4308 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4309 leading BMO character).
4310
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004311- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4312 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4313 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4314
4315 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4316 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4317 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004318
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004319 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4320 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4321 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4322 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4323 for various simple to use conversions.
4324
4325 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4326 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4327
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004328 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4329 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4330 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4331 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4332 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4333 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4334 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4335 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4336 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4337 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4338 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4339 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4340 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4341 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4342 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004343
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004344- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4345 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4346 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004347 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004348 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004349
4350 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004351 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4352 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4353 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4354 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4355 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004356 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4357 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004358
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004359 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4360 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4361 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004362 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004363
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004364- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4365 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4366 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4367 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4368 floating arithmetic,
4369
4370 x = 9007199254740992.0
4371 print long(x)
4372
4373 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4374 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4375 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4376 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4377 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4378 functions are of good quality).
4379
4380 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4381 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4382 algorithms to break.
4383
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004384- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4385 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4386 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4387 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4388 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4389 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4390 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4391 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4392 order.
4393
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004394- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4395 operation along the most common code paths.
4396
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004397- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4398 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4399
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004400- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4401 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4402 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4403 {}.update(UserDict())
4404
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004405- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4406 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4407 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4408 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4409 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4410 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4411 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4412 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4413
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004414- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004415 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004416
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004417 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004418 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4419 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004420 join() method of strings
4421 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004422 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4423 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004424 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004425 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004426
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004427- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4428 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4429
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004430- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4431 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4432
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004433- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4434 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4435 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4436 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4437
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004438- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4439 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004440 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004441 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4442 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004443
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004444- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4445
4446
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004447Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004448-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004449
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004450- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004451 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004452 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4453 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4454
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004455- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4456 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4457
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004458- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4459 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4460 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4461 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4462
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004463- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4464 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4465 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4466
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004467- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4468
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004469- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4470
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004471- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4472 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4473 that are still imported into string.py).
4474
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004475- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4476
4477- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4478 Now it does.
4479
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004480- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4481
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004482- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4483 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4484 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4485 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4486 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004487 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4488 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004489
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004490- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4491 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4492 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4493 'help(object)'.
4494
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004495Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004496-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004497
4498- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004499 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004500 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4501 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4502
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004503- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004504 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4505 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004506
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004507C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004508-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004509
4510- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4511 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004512
4513----
4514
4515**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**