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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
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000015- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
16 deprecated, but the nuissance warning will not be issued.
17
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000018- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
19 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
20 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
21 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
22 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
23 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
24 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
25 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
26 destroyed.
27
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +000028- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
29 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
30 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
31 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
32 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
33 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
34 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
35 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
36
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +000037- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
38 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
39 character other than a space.
40
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +000041- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
42 by the function object or by the method object, the function
43 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
44 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
45 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
46 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
47 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
48 attributes with the same name.
49
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000050- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
51 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
52 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
53 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
54 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
55 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
56 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
57 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
58 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
59 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
60 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
61 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
62 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
63 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +000064
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +000065- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
66 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
67 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
68 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
69 This has been repaired.
70
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000071- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
72
73- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
74
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +000075- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
76 over a sequence.
77
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +000078- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
79
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +000080- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
81 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
82 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
83 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
84 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
85 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
86 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
87 records with equal keys is unchanged).
88
Raymond Hettinger0a9b9da2003-10-29 06:54:43 +000089- Added a list.sorted() classmethod that returns a new sorted list
90 from any iterable.
Alex Martellidd666452003-10-25 13:02:57 +000091
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +000092- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
93 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
94 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
95
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000096- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
97 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
98 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
99 freelist.
100
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000101- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
102 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
103
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000104- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
105 number.
106
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000107- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
108 a TypeError exception.
109
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000110- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
111 820195.
112
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000113- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
114 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
115 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
116
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000117Extension modules
118-----------------
119
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000120- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
121 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
122 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
123 other functions that expect a function argument.
124
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000125- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
126
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000127- os.getsid was added.
128
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000129- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
130 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
131 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
132
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000133- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
134
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000135- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
136
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000137- readline.clear_history was added.
138
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000139- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
140
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000141- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
142
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000143- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
144
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000145- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
146
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000147- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
148
149- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
150
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000151- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
152
153- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
154
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000155- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
156 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
157 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
158
159- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
160 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
161 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
162 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
163 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
164 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
165 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
166
167- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
168 iterators from a single iterable.
169
170- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
171 of raising a TypeError exception.
172
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000173Library
174-------
175
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000176- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
177 indent, width and depth.
178
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000179- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
180 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
181
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000182- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
183 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
184
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000185- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
186
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000187- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
188
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000189- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
190
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000191- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
192 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
193
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000194- heapq.py has been converted to C for improved performance
195
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000196- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
197 a string).
198
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000199- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
200
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000201- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
202
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000203- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
204
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000205- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
206
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000207- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
208 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
209 list of fieldnames.
210
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000211- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
212 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
213
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000214- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
215
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000216- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
217 empty lists.
218
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000219- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
220 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
221 and shelves.
222
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000223- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
224 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
225
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000226- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000227 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
228 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000229
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000230- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
231 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000232 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000233
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000234- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000235 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
236 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
237
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000238- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
239 and removed in Py2.4.
240
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000241- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
242
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000243Tools/Demos
244-----------
245
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000246- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
247
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000248- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
249 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
250 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
251 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
252
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000253- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
254
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000255- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
256 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
257 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
258 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
259 now.
260
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000261- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
262 in effect
263
264- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
265 C-c C-h
266
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000267- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
268 -d option was given.
269
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000270Build
271-----
272
273C API
274-----
275
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000276- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
277 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
278 about 10% faster.
279
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000280- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
281 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
282
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000283- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
284 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
285 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
286 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
287
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000288New platforms
289-------------
290
291Tests
292-----
293
294Windows
295-------
296
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000297- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
298 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
299 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
300 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
301
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000302- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
303 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
304 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
305
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000306Mac
307----
308
309
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000310What's New in Python 2.3 final?
311===============================
312
313*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
314
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000315IDLE
316----
317
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000318- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
319 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
320 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
321 context-menu actions.
322
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000323- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
324 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
325 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
326 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
327 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
328 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
329 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
330 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
331 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
332
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000333
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000334What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
335=============================================
336
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000337*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000338
339Core and builtins
340-----------------
341
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000342- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000343 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000344 comment at the end are still unsupported.
345
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000346Extension modules
347-----------------
348
349- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
350 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
351 than once. This has been fixed.
352
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000353- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
354 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
355 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
356 call.
357
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000358- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
359
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000360Library
361-------
362
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000363- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
364 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
365
366- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
367 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
368 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
369 restored.
370
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000371IDLE
372----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000373
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000374- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000375
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000376Build
377-----
378
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000379- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
380 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
381
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000382C API
383-----
384
385Windows
386-------
387
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000388- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
389 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
390
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000391- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
392
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000393Mac
394---
395
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000396- Various fixes to pimp.
397
398- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
399
400- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
401 more problems than it solves.
402
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000403
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000404What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
405=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000406
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000407*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
408
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000409Core and builtins
410-----------------
411
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000412- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
413 by sys.setcheckinterval().
414
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000415- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
416 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000417 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000418
419- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
420 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
421 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000422 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000423
424- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
425 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000426
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000427- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
428 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
429 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
430
431- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000432 770247.
433
434- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000435
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000436Extension modules
437-----------------
438
439- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
440 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
441
442- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
443
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000444- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
445
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000446- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
447 contained within the _strptime module.
448
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000449- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
450 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
451
452- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000453 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
454
455- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
456 the find_class attribute, if present.
457
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000458- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000459
460 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
461 (SF bug 763298).
462
463 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000464 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
465 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
466 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000467
468 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
469
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000470Library
471-------
472
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000473- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
474
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000475- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
476 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
477 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
478 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
479 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
480 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
481 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
482 or Tester().
483
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000484- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
485 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
486 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
487 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
488 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
489 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
490 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
491 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
492 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000493
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000494 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000495
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000496- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
497 weren't before was an oversight.
498
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000499- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
500 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
501
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000502- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
503 when there are no lines.
504
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000505- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
506 which could occur with Tk 8.4
507
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000508- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
509 to child processes.
510
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000511- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
512
513- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
514
515- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
516 xmlrpclib.
517
518- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
519 responses.
520
521- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
522 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
523
524- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
525 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
526 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
527
528- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
529 used as patterns.
530
531- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
532 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
533 than Tk 8.3.
534
535- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
536
537- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000538
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000539Tools/Demos
540-----------
541
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000542- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
543
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000544- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
545
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000546- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000547
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000548Build
549-----
550
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000551- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
552
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000553- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
554
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000555- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
556 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000557
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000558- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
559 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
560 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000561
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000562C API
563-----
564
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000565- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
566 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
567
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000568Windows
569-------
570
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000571- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
572 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
573 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
574 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
575 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
576 Python exception ::
577
578 thread.error: can't start new thread
579
580 is raised now.
581
582- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
583 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
584 instead of from DLL teardown.
585
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000586Mac
587---
588
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000589- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000590 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000591 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
592 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
593 the executable in the bundle.
594
595- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000596
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000597- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
598
599- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
600 on Panther.
601
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000602What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
603================================
604
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000605*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000606
607Core and builtins
608-----------------
609
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000610- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
611 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
612 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
613 with the -i option.
614
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000615- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
616 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
617
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000618- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
619 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
620
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000621- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
622 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
623 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
624 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
625 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
626 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
627 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
628 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
629 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
630 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
631 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
632 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
633 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000634
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000635- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
636 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
637 embedded in a lambda expression.
638
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000639- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
640 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
641 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
642 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
643 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
644
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000645- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
646 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
647 matches the restriction on classic classes.
648
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000649- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
650 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
651
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000652- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
653 It's writable again.
654
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000655- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
656 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
657 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000658 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000659
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000660- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
661 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
662 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
663
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000664Extension modules
665-----------------
666
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000667- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
668 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
669
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000670- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
671 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
672 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
673 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
674
675- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
676 collection.
677
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000678- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
679 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
680 unique within a single program run.
681
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000682- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
683 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
684
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000685- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
686 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
687
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000688- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
689 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000690
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000691- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
692
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000693- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
694 Fixes SF bug #730685.
695
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000696- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
697 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
698 for many BSD-derived systems.
699
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000700
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000701Library
702-------
703
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000704- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
705 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
706 primary ones:
707
708 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
709 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
710 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
711
712 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
713 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
714 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
715 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
716 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
717 framework features (which doctest lacks).
718
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000719- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
720 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
721 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
722 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
723 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
724 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
725 argument.
726
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000727- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
728 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
729 in the archive.
730
731- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
732 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
733
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000734- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
735 569574).
736
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000737- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
738 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
739 no more.
740
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000741- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
742 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
743 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
744 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
745 code coverage.
746
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000747- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
748 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
749 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000750 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
751 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000752
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000753- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
754 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
755 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000756 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000757
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000758- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
759
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000760- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
761 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
762 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
763 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
764
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000765- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
766 handling.
767
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000768- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
769 __doc__ of data descriptors.
770
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000771- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
772 in socket.py.
773
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000774- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
775
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000776- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
777 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
778 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
779 opener with proxy support.
780
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000781- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
782
783- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
784
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000785Tools/Demos
786-----------
787
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000788- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
789
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000790- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
791
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000792- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
793 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000794
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000795- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
796 files.
797
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000798Build
799-----
800
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000801- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000802 different root directory.
803
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000804C API
805-----
806
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000807- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
808 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
809 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
810 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
811 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
812 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
813 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
814 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
815 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
816 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
817
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000818- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
819 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
820 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
821 from Python.
822
823
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000824New platforms
825-------------
826
827None this time.
828
829Tests
830-----
831
832- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
833 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
834
835Windows
836-------
837
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000838- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
839
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000840- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
841 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
842 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
843 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
844 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
845 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
846 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
847 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
848 that's what it's for.
849
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000850Mac
851---
852
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000853- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
854 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
855 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
856 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000857- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
858 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
859- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000860
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000861SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
862------------------------------------
863
864430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
865598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
866622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
867661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
868683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
869697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
870713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
871724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
872727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
873729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
874730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
875731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
876732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
877733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
878735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
879740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
880744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
881745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
882747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
883749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
884751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
885753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
886755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
887757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
888760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
889
890
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000891What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
892================================
893
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000894*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000895
896Core and builtins
897-----------------
898
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000899- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
900 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
901
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000902- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
903 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
904 and cannot be strings).
905
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000906- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
907 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
908 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
909 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
910
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000911- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
912 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
913 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
914 Python itself.
915
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000916- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
917 the referenced object, if it has one.
918
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000919- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
920 the thread started at
921 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
922
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000923- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
924 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
925 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
926 placed on a list index.
927
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000928- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
929 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
930 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
931 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
932
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000933- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
934 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
935 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
936 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
937 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
938 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
939 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
940
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000941- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
942 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
943 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
944 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
945 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
946
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000947- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
948 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000949
950- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
951 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
952 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
953 #693195.)
954
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000955- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
956 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000957
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000958- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000959 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000960 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
961 interpreter executions, would fail.
962
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000963- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000964 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000965 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000966
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000967Extension modules
968-----------------
969
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000970- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
971 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
972 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
973 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
974
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000975- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
976 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
977
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000978- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
979 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
980 and Greg Chapman.)
981
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000982- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
983 recursively.
984
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000985- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000986 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
987 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
988 leaks.
989
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000990- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
991
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000992- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
993 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
994 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
995 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
996 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
997 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
998 #705836.
999
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001000- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001001 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1002
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001003- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1004 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1005 See SF bug #692416.
1006
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001007- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1008 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1009
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001010- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1011 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1012 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001013
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001014- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001015 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1016 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1017
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001018- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1019 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1020 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1021 timeouts to work properly.
1022
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001023Library
1024-------
1025
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001026- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1027 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1028 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1029 future release.
1030
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001031- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1032 for querying platform dependent features.
1033
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001034- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001035
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001036- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1037 pickle protocol versions.
1038
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001039- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1040 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1041 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1042
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001043- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1044
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001045- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1046 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1047 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1048 modules.
1049
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001050- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1051 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1052 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1053
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001054- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1055 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1056
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001057- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1058 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1059 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1060
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001061- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001062 MS Office extensions.
1063
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001064- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1065 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1066
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001067- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1068 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1069
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001070- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1071 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1072 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1073 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1074 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1075 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1076
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001077- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1078 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1079 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001080
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001081- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1082 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1083 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1084
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001085- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1086
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001087- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1088 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1089 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1090
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001091Tools/Demos
1092-----------
1093
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001094- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1095 See the module docstring for details.
1096
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001097Build
1098-----
1099
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001100- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1101 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001102
1103C API
1104-----
1105
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001106- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1107
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001108- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1109 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1110 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1111
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001112- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1113 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001114
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001115 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1116 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1117 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001118
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001119- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001120 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1121
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001122- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1123 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1124 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001125
1126New platforms
1127-------------
1128
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001129None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001130
1131Tests
1132-----
1133
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001134- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1135 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001136
1137Windows
1138-------
1139
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001140- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1141 function.
1142
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001143- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1144 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001145
1146Mac
1147---
1148
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001149- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1150 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001151
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001152- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1153 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001154
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001155- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1156 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1157 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001158
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001159- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001160 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1161 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001162
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001163- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1164 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001165
1166
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001167What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1168=================================
1169
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001170*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001171
1172Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001173-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001174
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001175- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1176 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1177 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1178
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001179- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1180 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1181 (SF patch #664376.)
1182
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001183- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1184 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1185 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1186 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1187 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1188 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001189 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001190
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001191- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1192 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1193 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1194 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001195 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001196
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001197- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1198 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1199 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1200 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1201 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1202 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1203 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1204 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1205 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1206 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1207 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1208
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001209- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1210 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1211 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1212 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1213 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1214 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1215
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001216- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1217 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1218
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001219- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1220 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1221 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1222 case.)
1223
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001224- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1225 passed as unicode strings.
1226
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001227- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1228 See SF bug #683467.
1229
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001230- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1231 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1232
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001233- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1234
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001235- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1236
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001237- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1238 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1239 arguments.
1240
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001241- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1242 See SF bug #667147.
1243
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001244- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001245 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001246 See SF bug #676155.
1247
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001248- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001249 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001250 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1251 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1252 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1253 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1254 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1255 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001256
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001257Extension modules
1258-----------------
1259
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001260- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1261 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1262 tp_as_number pointer.
1263
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001264- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1265 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1266 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1267 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1268 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1269
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001270- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1271
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001272- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1273
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001274- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001275 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001276 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1277 patch #678531.)
1278
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001279- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1280 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1281
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001282- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1283 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1284
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001285- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1286
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001287- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1288 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1289 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1290
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001291- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1292
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001293- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1294 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1295
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001296- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001297
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001298- datetime changes:
1299
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001300 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1301
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001302 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1303 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1304 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1305 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1306 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1307 now.
1308
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001309 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001310 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1311 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001312
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001313 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001314 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001315 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1316 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1317 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1318 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001319
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001320 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1321 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1322 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001323 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1324
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001325 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1326 by a later example coded by Guido.
1327
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001328 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001329 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1330 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1331 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001332 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1333 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1334
1335 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1336 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1337 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1338 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1339 tzinfo subclass instance.
1340
1341 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1342 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1343 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1344 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1345 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1346 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1347 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1348 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001349
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001350 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1351 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1352 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1353 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1354 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001355 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1356
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001357 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001358
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001359 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1360 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1361 as a naive datetime object.
1362
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001363 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1364 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1365 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1366
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001367 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1368 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1369 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1370 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1371 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1372 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1373 comparison.
1374
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001375 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1376 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1377 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1378 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001379 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001380
1381 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001382
1383 and ::
1384
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001385 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1386
1387 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1388 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1389 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1390 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1391
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001392 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1393 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1394 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1395 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1396 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1397
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001398 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1399 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001400 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1401 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001402
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001403Library
1404-------
1405
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001406- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1407 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1408
1409- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1410 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1411 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1412 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1413 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1414 See PEP 307 for details.
1415
1416- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1417 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1418
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001419- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1420 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001421 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001422 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1423 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001424 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001425
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001426- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1427 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1428
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001429- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1430 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1431 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1432
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001433- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1434
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001435- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1436 exception.
1437
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001438- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1439 class.
1440
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001441- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1442 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1443 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1444
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001445- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1446 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1447
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001448- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001449 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1450 See SF bug #659228.
1451
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001452- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1453 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1454 See SF patch #651082.
1455
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001456- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001457
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001458- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1459 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1460
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001461- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001462 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001463
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001464- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1465 DOS paths from other platforms.
1466
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001467Tools/Demos
1468-----------
1469
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001470- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1471 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1472 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1473 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1474 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1475 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1476 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1477 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1478 example:
1479
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001480 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1481 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001482
1483 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1484
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001485
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001486Build
1487-----
1488
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001489- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1490 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1491 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001492 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1493
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001494 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1495
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001496- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1497 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1498 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1499 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1500 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1501 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1502 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1503 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1504 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1505
1506- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1507 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1508 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1509 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1510
1511- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1512 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1513
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001514C API
1515-----
1516
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001517- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1518 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001519
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001520- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1521 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1522 tp_as_number pointer.
1523
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001524- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1525 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1526 (SF #681367)
1527
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001528- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1529 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1530 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1531 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001532
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001533Tests
1534-----
1535
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001536- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001537 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1538 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1539 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1540 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1541 pydoc.)
1542
1543- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1544
1545- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001546
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001547Windows
1548-------
1549
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001550- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1551 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1552 time).
1553
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001554- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1555 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1556
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001557- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1558 release without strong cryptography.
1559
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001560- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001561 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001562
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001563- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1564 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1565
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001566Mac
1567---
1568
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001569- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1570 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001571
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001572- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1573 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1574 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001575
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001576- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1577 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001578
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001579- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1580 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1581 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1582 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001583
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001584- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001585 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1586 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1587 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001588
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001589
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001590What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001591=================================
1592
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001593*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001594
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001595Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001596--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001597
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001598- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1599
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001600- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1601 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001602 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001603 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001604 a different meaning than before.
1605
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001606- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001607 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001608 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001609
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001610- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001611 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001612 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001613
1614- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1615 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1616 and deallocation.
1617
1618- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1619 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1620
1621- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1622 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1623 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1624 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1625 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1626
1627- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1628 now detected by the garbage collector.
1629
1630- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1631 [SF bug 519621]
1632
1633- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1634 identifier.
1635
1636- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1637 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1638 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1639 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1640 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1641 [SF bug 563060]
1642
1643- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1644 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1645 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1646 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1647 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1648
1649- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1650 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1651 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1652
1653- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1654
1655- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1656 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1657 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1658 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1659 state of the slots would be lost.)
1660
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001661Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001662-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001663
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001664- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001665 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1666 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1667 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1668 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001669 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1670 Jython 2.1.
1671
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001672- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001673 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001674 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1675 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1676 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1677 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1678 these, see PEP 302.
1679
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001680- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1681 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1682 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1683
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001684- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1685 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1686 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1687
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001688- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1689 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1690 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1691
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001692- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1693 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1694 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1695 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1696 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1697 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1698 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1699 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1700 releases or implementations.
1701
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001702- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001703 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1704 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001705
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001706- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1707 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1708
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001709- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1710 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1711 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1712
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001713- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1714 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1715
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001716- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1717 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001718 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1719 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001720
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001721- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1722 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1723 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1724 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1725 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1726
1727 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1728 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1729 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1730 pattern.
1731
1732 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1733 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1734 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1735 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1736
1737 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1738 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1739 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1740 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1741 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1742 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1743
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001744- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1745 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1746 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1747 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1748 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1749 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1750 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1751 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001752
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001753- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1754 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1755 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1756 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1757 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001758 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1759 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1760 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1761 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1762 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1763 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1764 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001765
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001766- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1767 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1768
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001769- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1770 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1771 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1772 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1773 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1774 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1775 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1776 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1777 to Zack Weinberg!
1778
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001779- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1780 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1781 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1782 type. This has been fixed now.
1783
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001784- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1785 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1786 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1787
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001788- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1789 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1790 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1791 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1792 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1793 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1794 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1795 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001796 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001797
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001798- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1799 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1800 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001801
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001802- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1803 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1804 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1805 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1806 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1807 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1808 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1809 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001810 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001811 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1812 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1813
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001814- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1815 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1816 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1817 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1818 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1819 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1820 this.)
1821
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001822- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1823 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001824 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001825 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001826 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1827 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001828 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1829 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001830
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001831- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1832 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1833 currently running.
1834
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001835- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1836 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1837 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1838 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1839
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001840- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1841 as directory names.
1842
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001843- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1844 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1845
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001846- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1847 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1848
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001849- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001850 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1851 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001852
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001853- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1854 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1855 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1856 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1857 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1858
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001859- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1860 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1861 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1862 removed.
1863
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001864- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1865 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1866 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1867
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001868- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1869 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1870 to __debug__.
1871
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001872- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1873 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1874 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1875
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001876- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1877 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1878 deprecated now.
1879
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001880- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1881 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1882 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001883
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001884- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1885 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1886 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1887 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1888 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001889
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001890- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1891 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1892
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001893- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1894 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1895 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001896 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001897 is backward compatible.
1898
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001899- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1900 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1901 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1902 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1903 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1904
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001905- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1906 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1907 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1908 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1909 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1910 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001911
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001912- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1913 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1914
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001915- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1916 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1917
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001918- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1919 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1920 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1921 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1922 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1923
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001924- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1925 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1926 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1927
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001928- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001929 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1930
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001931- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1932 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1933 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001934
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001935- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1936 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1937
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001938- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1939 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1940 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1941
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001942- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1943
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001944Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001945-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001946
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001947- Added three operators to the operator module:
1948 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1949 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1950 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1951
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001952- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1953
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001954- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1955 archives.
1956
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001957- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1958 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1959 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1960
1961 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1962
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001963- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1964 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1965 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001966 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001967
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001968- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1969 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1970 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1971 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001972 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1973 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1974 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1975 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001976
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001977- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1978 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001979
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001980- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1981
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001982- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1983 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1984
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001985- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1986 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1987 supported.
1988
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001989- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1990
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001991- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1992 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001993
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001994- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1995 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1996
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001997- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1998
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001999- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2000 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2001
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002002- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2003 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2004 functions but callable type objects.
2005
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002006- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002007 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002008 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002009
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002010- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2011 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002012
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002013- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2014 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002015
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002016- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2017 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2018 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2019 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2020
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002021- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2022 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002023
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002024- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2025 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2026 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2027 and __imul__.
2028
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002029- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002030 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2031 is called.
2032
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002033- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2034 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2035 interpreter was compiled.
2036
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002037- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2038 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2039 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002040 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002041 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2042 1, not 2.
2043
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002044- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2045 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2046 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2047 limit.
2048
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002049- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2050 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2051 bug #623464.
2052
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002053- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2054 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2055 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2056 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2057
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002058Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002059-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002060
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002061- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2062
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002063- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2064 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2065 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2066 with Python 2.3a2.
2067
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002068- os.path exposes getctime.
2069
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002070- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002071 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002072 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002073 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002074 unit tests of floating point results.
2075
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002076- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2077 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2078 has been increased.
2079
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002080- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2081 executed.
2082
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002083- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2084 postinstallation script.
2085
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002086- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2087 test the current module.
2088
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002089- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002090 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2091 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2092 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2093 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2094
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002095- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002096 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002097 Ward's Optik package.
2098
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002099- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2100 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2101 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2102 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2103
2104- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2105 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002106 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002107
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002108- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2109 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2110 shelf are binary pickles.
2111
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002112- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2113 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2114
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002115- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2116 modules are iterators now.
2117
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002118- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2119 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2120 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2121 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2122 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2123 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002124
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002125- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2126 with their entity value.
2127
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002128- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2129
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002130- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2131 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002132
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002133- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2134 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002135 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002136
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002137- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2138 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2139 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2140 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2141 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2142 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2143 main():
2144
2145 import locale
2146 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2147
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002148- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2149 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2150
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002151- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2152 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2153 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2154 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2155 to the new standard.
2156
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002157- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2158 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2159 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2160 an extension to the database.
2161
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002162- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2163 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2164 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2165 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002166 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002167
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002168- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002169 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002170
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002171- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2172 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2173 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2174 bounded integers.
2175
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002176- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2177 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2178 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2179 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2180 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2181 in existence.
2182
2183 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2184 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2185 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2186 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2187 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2188 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2189
2190 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2191 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2192 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2193 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2194
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002195- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2196 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2197 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2198
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002199- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2200
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002201- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2202 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2203 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2204 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2205
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002206- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2207 argument.
2208
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002209- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2210 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2211 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2212 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2213 [SF patch 560794].
2214
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002215- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2216 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2217 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002218 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2219 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2220 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002221
2222- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2223 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002224
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002225- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2226 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2227 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2228 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002229
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002230- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2231 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2232 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2233 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2234 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2235
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002236- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002237
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002238- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2239
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002240- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2241 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2242 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2243 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2244 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2245 identical to None.
2246
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002247- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2248 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2249 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2250 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2251 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2252 results now.
2253
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002254- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2255 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2256
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002257- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2258 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2259 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2260 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2261 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2262 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2263 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2264 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2265
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002266- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2267
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002268- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2269 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2270
2271- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2272 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2273 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2274 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2275 and other systems.
2276
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002277- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2278 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2279 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2280 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 +00002281 work well with these.
2282
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002283- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2284
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002285- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002286 connections.
2287
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002288- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2289 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2290 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2291
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002292- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2293 sets
2294
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002295- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2296 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2297 name.
2298
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002299- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2300 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2301 passed in.
2302
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002303- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002304 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002305 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2306 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002307
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002308- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2309
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002310- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2311
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002312- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2313 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2314 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2315
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002316- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2317 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2318 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2319 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002320 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002321
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002322- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002323 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002324 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002325
2326- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2327 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2328 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2329
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002330- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002331 the value of its expression argument.
2332
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002333- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2334 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2335 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2336
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002337- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2338 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2339 skipstone browser was included.
2340
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002341- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2342 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2343
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002344Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002345-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002346
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002347- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2348 names in addition to accepting file names.
2349
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002350- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2351 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2352 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2353 still used and useful.)
2354
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002355- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2356 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2357 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2358 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002359
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002360- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2361 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2362 the generated binary.
2363
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002364Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002365-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002366
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002367- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2368
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002369- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2370 except in the hands of experts.
2371
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002372- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002373 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2374 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2375 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002376
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002377- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2378 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2379 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2380 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2381 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2382 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2383 builds.
2384
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002385- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2386 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2387 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2388 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2389 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2390 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2391 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2392 new type.
2393
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002394- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002395
2396 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2397 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2398 positive infinities.
2399
2400 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2401 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2402 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2403 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2404 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2405 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2406 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2407
2408 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2409
2410 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2411
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002412- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2413 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2414 size of the executable.
2415
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002416- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2417 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2418 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2419 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002420
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002421- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2422
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002423- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2424 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2425 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002426
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002427- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2428 well as Unix.
2429
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002430- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2431 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2432 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2433 modules in the README file for details.
2434
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002435C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002436-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002437
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002438- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2439 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002440 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002441 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002442 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002443
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002444- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2445 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2446 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2447 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2448 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2449 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002450 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002451 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2452 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2453 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2454 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2455 aligned.)
2456
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002457- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2458 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2459 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2460
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002461- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2462 level.
2463
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002464- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2465 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2466 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2467 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2468 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2469
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002470- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2471 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2472 code.
2473
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002474- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2475 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2476 adjusting for negative indices.
2477
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002478- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2479 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2480 object.
2481
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002482- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2483 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2484 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2485
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002486- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2487 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002488
2489- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2490
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002491- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2492 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2493 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2494 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2495
2496- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2497
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002498- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002499
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002500- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002501 without going through the buffer API.
2502
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002503- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002504
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002505- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2506 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2507 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2508 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2509
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002510- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2511 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2512
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002513- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002514 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2515
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002516New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002517-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002518
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002519- OpenVMS is now supported.
2520
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002521- AtheOS is now supported.
2522
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002523- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2524
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002525- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2526
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002527Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002528-----
2529
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002530- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2531 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2532 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002533
2534Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002535-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002536
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002537- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2538 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2539 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2540 bugs.
2541 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002542 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002543 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2544 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002545 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002546
2547- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002548 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002549
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002550- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2551 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2552
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002553- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2554 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002555 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002556 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2557
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002558- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2559 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2560 use files" uninstall option).
2561
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002562- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2563
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002564- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2565 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2566
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002567- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2568 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2569 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2570
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002571- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2572 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2573 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2574 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2575 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002576 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2577 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2578 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002579
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002580- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002581 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002582 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2583 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2584 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2585 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2586 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2587 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2588 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2589 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2590 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2591 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2592 work around.
2593
2594- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2595 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2596 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2597 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2598 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2599 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2600 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2601 specified with O_CREAT too).
2602
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002603Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002604----
2605
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002606- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002607
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002608- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2609 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2610 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2611
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002612- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2613 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2614 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2615
2616- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2617 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2618 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2619 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2620 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2621 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2622 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2623 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002624
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002625- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2626 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2627 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002628
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002629- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2630 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2631 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2632 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2633 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002634
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002635- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2636 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2637 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002638
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002639- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2640 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002641
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002642- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2643 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2644 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2645 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2646 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002647
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002648- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2649 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2650 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2651
2652- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2653 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2654 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002655
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002656- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2657 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2658 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2659 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002660 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002661
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002662- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2663 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002664
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002665- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2666 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002667
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002668- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002669 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002670 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2671 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002672
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002673
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002674What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002675===============================
2676
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002677*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2678
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002679Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002680--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002681
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002682- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2683 with a custom metaclass.
2684
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002685Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002686-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002687
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002688- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2689 are proxies.
2690
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002691Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002692-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002693
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002694- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2695 very short strings.
2696
2697- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2698 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2699 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2700 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2701 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2702
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002703Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002704-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002705
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002706- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2707 close or delete time).
2708
2709- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2710 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2711
2712- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2713
2714- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002715 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002716
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002717Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002718-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002719
2720Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002721-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002722
2723C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002724-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002725
2726New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002727-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002728
2729Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002730-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002731
2732Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002733-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002734
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002735- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2736
2737- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2738 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2739
2740- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2741 deleted at process exit time.
2742
2743- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2744 in backslash.
2745
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002746Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002747----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002748
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002749- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2750 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2751 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2752
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002753
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002754What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002755===========================
2756
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002757*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2758
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002759Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002760--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002761
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002762- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2763 been extensively updated. See
2764
2765 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2766
2767 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2768
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002769- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2770 deleted!
2771
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002772- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2773 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2774 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2775 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2776 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2777
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002778- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2779
2780 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2781 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2782
2783 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2784 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2785 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2786 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2787 supported anyway.
2788
2789 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2790 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2791
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002792- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2793 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2794 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2795 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2796 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002797
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002798- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2799 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2800 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2801
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002802Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002803-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002804
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002805- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2806 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2807 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2808 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2809 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2810 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002811 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2812 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2813 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2814 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002815
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002816- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2817 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2818 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2819
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002820Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002821-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002822
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002823- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2824
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002825Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002826-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002827
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002828- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2829 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2830 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2831 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2832 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2833 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2834
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002835- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2836
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002837- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2838
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002839- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2840
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002841- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2842 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2843 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2844
2845- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2846
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002847Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002848-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002849
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002850- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2851 off a search on Google.
2852
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002853Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002854-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002855
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002856- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2857 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2858 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2859 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2860 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2861 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2862 other platforms should do likewise.
2863
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002864- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2865 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2866 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2867
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002868C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002869-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002870
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002871- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2872 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2873 producing key-value pairs.
2874
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002875- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002876 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002877 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2878 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2879 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2880 previously went unchallenged.
2881
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002882New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002883-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002884
2885Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002886-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002887
2888Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002889-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002890
2891Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002892----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002893
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002894- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2895 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002896
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002897- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2898 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2899 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2900 home.
2901
2902
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002903What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002904===========================
2905
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002906*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2907
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002908Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002909--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002910
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002911- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2912 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002913
2914 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002915 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002916
2917 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2918 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002919 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002920 This needs to be documented.
2921
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002922- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2923 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2924
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002925- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2926 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2927 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2928
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002929- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2930 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2931
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002932- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2933 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2934 class forbids it).
2935
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002936- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2937 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2938 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2939
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002940- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2941
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002942Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002943-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002944
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002945- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2946 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002947 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002948
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002949- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2950 (like 1 + '').
2951
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002952Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002953-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002954
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002955- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2956 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2957 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2958 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002959 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002960 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2961
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002962- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2963 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2964 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2965 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2966
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002967- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2968 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002969 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2970 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2971 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002972
2973- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2974 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002975
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002976- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2977 bytes on its input.
2978
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002979Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002980-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002981
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002982- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002983 convenience function.
2984
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002985- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2986 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2987 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002988 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2989 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2990 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2991 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2992 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2993 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002994
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002995- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2996 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2997 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2998 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2999
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003000- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3001 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3002 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3003
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003004- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3005 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3006 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3007 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3008
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003009- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3010 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003011 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003012 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3013 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3014 new -l and -e options.
3015
3016- statcache is now deprecated.
3017
3018- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3019 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003020 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003021 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3022 time properly taken into account.
3023
3024- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3025 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3026 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3027 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3028
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003029Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003030-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003031
3032Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003033-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003034
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003035- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3036 is built with libdb3 if available.
3037
3038- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3039
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003040C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003041-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003042
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003043- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3044 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3045 PySequence_Size().
3046
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003047- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3048
3049- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3050 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3051 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3052
3053- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3054 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3055
3056- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3057 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3058
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003059New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003060-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003061
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003062- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3063 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3064
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003065- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3066 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3067
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003068- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3069
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003070Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003071-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003072
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003073- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3074 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3075
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003076Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003077-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003078
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003079Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003080----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003081
3082- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3083 removed completely in the next release.
3084
3085- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3086 OSX.
3087
3088- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3089 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3090
3091- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3092
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003093
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003094What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003095===========================
3096
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003097*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3098
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003099Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003100--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003101
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003102- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003103 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003104 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003105 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3106 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003107 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3108 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003109 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3110 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003111
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003112- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3113 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3114
3115- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3116 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3117
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003118Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003119-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003120
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003121- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3122 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3123 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3124 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3125 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3126 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3127 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3128 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3129
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003130- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3131 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3132 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3133 example).
3134
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003135- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003136 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003137 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003138 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003139
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003140- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3141 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3142 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003143 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003144
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003145- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3146 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3147 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3148 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3149 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3150 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3151
3152 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3153
3154 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3155
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003156Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003157-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003158
3159- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3160
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003161- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3162
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003163- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3164 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003165
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003166- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3167 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3168 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3169 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3170 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3171 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003172 attributes.
3173
3174- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3175 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3176 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003177
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003178- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3179 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3180 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003181
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003182- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3183 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3184 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003185 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3186 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3187
3188- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3189 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003190
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003191Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003192-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003193
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003194- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3195 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3196
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003197- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3198 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3199 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3200 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3201
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003202- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3203 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3204 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3205 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3206
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003207 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3208 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3209 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3210 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3211 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3212 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3213 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3214 without losing information).
3215
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003216- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003217 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3218 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3219 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3220 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3221 module).
3222
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003223 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003224 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3225 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3226 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3227 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003228
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003229- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003230 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3231 encoding.
3232
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003233- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3234 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3235
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003236- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003237 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3238
3239- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3240 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3241 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3242 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3243
3244- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3245
3246- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3247 ON, and OFF.
3248
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003249- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3250 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3251
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003252Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003253-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003254
3255- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3256 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3257 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003258
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003259- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3260 been added: -X and -E.
3261
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003262Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003263-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003264
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003265- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3266 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3267
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003268C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003269-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003270
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003271- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3272 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3273 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3274 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3275 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3276
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003277- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3278 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3279 as long) arguments.
3280
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003281- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3282 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3283 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3284 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3285 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3286 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3287
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003288- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3289 input.
3290
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003291New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003292-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003293
3294Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003295-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003296
3297Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003298-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003299
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003300- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3301 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3302 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3303
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003304- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3305 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3306 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003307 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003308
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003309 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3310 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3311 import signal
3312 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003313
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003314 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003315 while 1:
3316 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003317 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003318 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3319 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3320 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3321 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003322
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003323
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003324What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3325===========================
3326
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003327*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3328
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003329Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003330--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003331
3332- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3333 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3334 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3335
3336- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3337 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3338 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3339 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3340 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3341 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3342 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003343
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003344- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003345 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003346 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3347 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3348 associate a docstring with a property.
3349
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003350- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3351 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3352 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3353 other built-in object types.
3354
3355- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3356 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3357 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3358 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3359 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3360
3361- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3362 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3363
3364- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3365 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003366 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003367 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3368 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3369 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3370 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3371 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3372
3373- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3374 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3375 class.
3376
3377- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3378 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3379 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3380 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3381
3382- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3383 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3384 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3385 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3386
3387- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3388 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3389
3390- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3391 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3392 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3393 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3394 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003395 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003396 with the same value as s.
3397
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003398- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3399
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003400Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003401----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003402
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003403- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3404
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003405- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3406 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3407 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3408 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3409 objects.
3410
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003411- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3412 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003413 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3414 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3415
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003416- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3417 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3418 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3419
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003420Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003421-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003422
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003423- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3424 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3425 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3426 by the instances.
3427
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003428- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3429 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3430 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3431
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003432- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3433 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3434 before the entire comparison is complete.
3435
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003436- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3437 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3438 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3439
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003440- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3441 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3442 getwriter().
3443
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003444- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3445 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3446
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003447- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003448 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3449 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3450
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003451- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3452 iterable object.
3453
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003454- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3455 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003456
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003457- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3458 authentication.
3459
3460- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3461 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003462
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003463- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003464 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3465 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3466 a sample driver.)
3467
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003468Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003469-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003470
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003471- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3472 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3473 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3474 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3475 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3476 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3477 kernel has large file support.
3478
3479- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3480 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3481 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3482 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3483 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3484
3485- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3486 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3487 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3488
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003489C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003490-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003491
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003492- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3493 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3494
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003495New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003496-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003497
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003498- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3499 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3500
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003501Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003502-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003503
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003504- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3505 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3506 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3507 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3508 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3509
3510- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3511 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3512 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3513 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3514
3515- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3516 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3517
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003518Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003519-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003520
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003521- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003522 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3523 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003524
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003525
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003526What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3527===========================
3528
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003529*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3530
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003531Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003532----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003533
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003534- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3535 big to represent as a C double.
3536
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003537- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3538 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3539 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3540 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3541 restriction).
3542
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003543- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3544 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3545 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3546 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3547 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3548
3549 >>> dir([])
3550 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3551 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3552 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3553 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3554 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3555 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3556 'reverse', 'sort']
3557
3558 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3559
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003560- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003561 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3562 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3563 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3564 OverflowError exception.
3565
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003566- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003567 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003568 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3569 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3570 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3571 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3572 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003573 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003574 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3575 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3576
3577 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3578 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3579 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3580 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003581
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003582- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003583 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3584 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3585 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3586 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3587 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3588 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3589 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3590 once it is created.
3591
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003592- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3593 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3594 (key, value) pairs.
3595
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003596- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003597 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3598 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3599
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003600- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3601 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3602 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3603 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3604 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003605
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003606- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003607 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3608 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3609
3610 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3611
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003612- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003613 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3614
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003615Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003616-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003617
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003618- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003619 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3620 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003621
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003622- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3623 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3624 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3625 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3626 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3627 in this area anymore).
3628
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003629- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3630 threading.Timer.
3631
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003632- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3633 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3634
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003635- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003636 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3637
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003638- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003639 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3640 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3641 converted to Python longs.
3642
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003643- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003644 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3645
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003646- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3647 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3648 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3649
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003650Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003651-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003652
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003653- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3654 division operators as per PEP 238.
3655
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003656Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003657-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003658
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003659- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3660 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3661 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3662 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3663
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003664C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003665-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003666
3667- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003668
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003669- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3670 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003671 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003672
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003673 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3674 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003675 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003676 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003677
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003678- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003679 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3680 module:
3681
3682 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003683
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003684 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3685 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003686
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003687 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3688 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003689
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003690 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3691
3692 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3693
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003694- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003695 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3696 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3697 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003698
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003699New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003700-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003701
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003702- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3703 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3704 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3705 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3706 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003707
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003708Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003709-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003710
3711Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003712-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003713
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003714- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3715 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3716 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3717 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003718 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3719 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3720 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3721 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3722 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003723
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003724- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003725 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3726
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003727
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003728What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3729===========================
3730
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003731*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3732
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003733Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003734-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003735
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003736- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3737 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3738
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003739- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3740 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3741 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003742
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003743- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3744 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3745 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3746 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003747
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003748- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3749
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003750- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003751
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003752Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003753-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003754
3755- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003756 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003757 the module docstring for details.
3758
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003759Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003760-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003761
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003762- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003763 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3764 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3765 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003766
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003767- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3768 Nick Mathewson.
3769
3770Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003771----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003772
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003773- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3774 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3775 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3776 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3777 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3778 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3779 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3780 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3781
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003782- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3783 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3784 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3785 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3786
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003787- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3788 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3789 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3790 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3791 come a long way).
3792
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003793- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3794 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3795 write filters for these warnings).
3796
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003797- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3798 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3799 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3800 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3801 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3802
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003803- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3804 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3805 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3806 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3807 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3808 older distribution.
3809
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003810Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003811-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003812
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003813- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3814 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003815 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003816
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003817- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3818 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3819 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3820
3821- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3822
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003823- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3824
3825- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3826
3827- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3828
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003829- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003830
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003831- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3832
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003833New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003834-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003835
3836C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003837-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003838
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003839- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3840 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3841 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3842 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3843 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3844 against buffer overruns.
3845
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003846- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003847 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3848 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003849 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3850 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3851 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3852
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003853- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3854 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3855 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3856 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3857 deprecated.
3858
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003859Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003860-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003861
3862- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3863 relevant is found.
3864
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003865
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003866What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003867===========================
3868
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003869*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3870
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003871Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003872----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003873
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003874- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3875 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3876 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3877 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3878 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3879 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3880 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3881 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003882 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003883 repaired.
3884
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003885- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003886 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003887 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3888 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3889 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3890 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3891 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3892 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3893 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3894 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3895
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003896- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3897 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3898 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3899 leading BMO character).
3900
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003901- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3902 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3903 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3904
3905 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3906 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3907 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003908
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003909 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3910 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3911 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3912 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3913 for various simple to use conversions.
3914
3915 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3916 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3917
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003918 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3919 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3920 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3921 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3922 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3923 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3924 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3925 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3926 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3927 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3928 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3929 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3930 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3931 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3932 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003933
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003934- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3935 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3936 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003937 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003938 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003939
3940 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003941 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3942 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3943 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3944 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3945 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003946 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3947 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003948
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003949 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3950 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3951 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003952 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003953
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003954- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3955 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3956 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3957 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3958 floating arithmetic,
3959
3960 x = 9007199254740992.0
3961 print long(x)
3962
3963 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3964 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3965 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3966 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3967 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3968 functions are of good quality).
3969
3970 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3971 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3972 algorithms to break.
3973
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003974- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3975 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3976 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3977 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3978 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3979 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3980 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3981 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3982 order.
3983
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003984- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3985 operation along the most common code paths.
3986
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003987- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3988 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3989
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003990- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3991 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3992 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3993 {}.update(UserDict())
3994
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003995- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3996 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3997 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3998 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3999 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4000 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4001 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4002 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4003
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004004- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004005 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004006
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004007 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004008 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4009 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004010 join() method of strings
4011 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004012 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4013 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004014 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004015 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004016
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004017- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4018 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4019
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004020- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4021 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4022
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004023- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4024 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4025 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4026 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4027
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004028- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4029 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004030 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004031 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4032 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004033
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004034- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4035
4036
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004037Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004038-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004039
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004040- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004041 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004042 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4043 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4044
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004045- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4046 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4047
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004048- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4049 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4050 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4051 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4052
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004053- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4054 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4055 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4056
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004057- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4058
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004059- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4060
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004061- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4062 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4063 that are still imported into string.py).
4064
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004065- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4066
4067- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4068 Now it does.
4069
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004070- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4071
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004072- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4073 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4074 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4075 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4076 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004077 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4078 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004079
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004080- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4081 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4082 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4083 'help(object)'.
4084
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004085Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004086-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004087
4088- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004089 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004090 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4091 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4092
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004093- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004094 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4095 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004096
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004097C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004098-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004099
4100- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4101 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004102
4103----
4104
4105**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**