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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
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +000015- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
16 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
17 the LC_NUMERIC category.
18
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +000019- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
20 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
21 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
22
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +000023- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
24
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +000025- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
26 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
27 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +000028
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000029- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
30 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
31
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000032- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
33
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000034- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
35 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
36
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000037- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
38
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000039- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
40
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000041- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
42 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
43
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000044- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
45 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
46 Fixes bug #858016 .
47
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000048- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
49 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
50 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
51
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000052- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
53 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
54 improves their performance (about 35%).
55
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000056- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
57 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
58 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
59
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000060- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
61 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
62 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
63 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
64
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000065- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
66 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
67 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
68 length is not known).
69
70- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
71 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000072 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
73 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000074 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
75
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000076- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
77 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
78
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000079- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
80 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
81 keyword arguments.
82
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000083- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
84 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
85 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
86
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000087- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
88 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
89 cases.
90
91- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
92 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
93 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
94 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
95 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
96 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
97 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
98 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
99 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
100 a release build.
101
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000102- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
103 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
104
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000105- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000106 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000107
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000108- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
109 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
110 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
111 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
112 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
113 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
114 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
115 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
116 destroyed.
117
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000118- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
119 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
120 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
121 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
122 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
123 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
124 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
125 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
126
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000127- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
128 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
129 character other than a space.
130
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000131- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
132 by the function object or by the method object, the function
133 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
134 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
135 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
136 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
137 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
138 attributes with the same name.
139
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000140- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
141 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
142 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
143 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
144 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
145 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
146 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
147 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
148 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
149 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
150 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
151 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
152 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
153 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000154
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000155- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
156 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
157 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
158 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
159 This has been repaired.
160
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000161- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
162
163- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
164
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000165- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
166 over a sequence.
167
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000168- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000169 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000170
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000171- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
172
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000173- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
174 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
175 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
176 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
177 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
178 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
179 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
180 records with equal keys is unchanged).
181
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000182- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
183 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
184 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
185
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000186- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
187 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
188 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
189 freelist.
190
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000191- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
192 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
193
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000194- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
195 number.
196
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000197- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
198 a TypeError exception.
199
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000200- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
201 820195.
202
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000203- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
204 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
205 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
206
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000207- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
208 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
209 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000210
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000211- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
212 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
213 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
214
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000215- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
216 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000217 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000218
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000219- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000220 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
221 the first call.
222
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000223
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000224Extension modules
225-----------------
226
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000227- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
228
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000229- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
230
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000231- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
232 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
233
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000234- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
235 fewer false positives.
236
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000237- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
238 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
239
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000240- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
241 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
242
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000243- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
244 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000245 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
246 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
247 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000248
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000249- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
250 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
251 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
252 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
253
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000254- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
255 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
256 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
257 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
258 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
259 #897625.
260
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000261- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
262 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
263
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000264- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
265 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
266 and pops on either side of the deque.
267
268- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
269 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
270
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000271- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
272 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
273 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
274 other functions that expect a function argument.
275
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000276- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
277
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000278- os.getsid was added.
279
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000280- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
281 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
282 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
283
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000284- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
285
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000286- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
287
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000288- readline.clear_history was added.
289
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000290- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
291
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000292- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
293
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000294- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
295
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000296- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
297
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000298- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
299
300- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
301
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000302- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
303
304- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
305
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000306- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
307 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
308 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
309
310- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
311 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
312 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
313 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
314 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
315 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
316 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
317
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000318- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
319 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
320 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
321 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000322
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000323- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
324 iterators from a single iterable.
325
326- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
327 of raising a TypeError exception.
328
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000329- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
330 as parameter.
331
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000332Library
333-------
334
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000335- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
336
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000337- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
338 on cygwin and mingw32.
339
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000340- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
341
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000342- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
343 module.
344
Martin v. Löwiseac324b2004-06-03 09:18:35 +0000345- asyncore.loop now has repeat count parameter that defaults to infinity.
346
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000347- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
348 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
349 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
350
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000351- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
352 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
353 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
354
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000355- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
356
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000357- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
358
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000359- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
360 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
361
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000362- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
363 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
364 type pattern with the same value exists.
365
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000366- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
367 when run from the command prompt).
368
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000369- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
370 not taken into consideration when caching value.
371
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000372- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
373 default sort).
374
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000375- Added global runctx function to profile module
376
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000377- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
378
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000379- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
380
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000381- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
382
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000383- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
384 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
385 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
386 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
387 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
388 accordingly.
389
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000390- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
391 decoding standards.
392
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000393- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
394 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
395 called for all requests.
396
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000397- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
398 they are passed to the compiler.
399
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000400- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
401 indent, width and depth.
402
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000403- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
404 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
405
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000406- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
407 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
408
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000409- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
410
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000411- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
412
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000413- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
414
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000415- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
416 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
417
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000418- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
419 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000420
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000421- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
422 a string).
423
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000424- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
425
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000426- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
427
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000428- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
429
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000430- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
431
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000432- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
433 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
434 list of fieldnames.
435
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000436- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
437 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
438
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000439- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
440
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000441- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
442 empty lists.
443
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000444- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
445 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
446 and shelves.
447
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000448- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
449 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
450
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000451- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000452 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
453 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000454
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000455- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
456 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000457 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000458
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000459- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000460 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
461 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
462
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000463- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
464 and removed in Py2.4.
465
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000466- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
467
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000468- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
469
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000470Tools/Demos
471-----------
472
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000473- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
474 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
475
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000476- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
477
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000478- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
479 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
480 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
481 destination in situations where both files are given.
482
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000483- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
484 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
485 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
486 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
487
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000488- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
489
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000490- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
491 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
492 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
493 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
494 now.
495
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000496- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
497 in effect
498
499- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
500 C-c C-h
501
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000502- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
503 -d option was given.
504
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000505Build
506-----
507
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000508- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
509 is configured --with-tsc.
510
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000511- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
512 on AMD64.
513
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000514- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
515 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
516
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000517- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
518 removed.
519
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000520- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
521 supported (see PEP 11).
522
523- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
524
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000525- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
526
527- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
528 (see PEP 11).
529
530- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
531 sizeof(char) must be 1.
532
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000533C API
534-----
535
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000536- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
537 generator objects.
538
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000539- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
540 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000541 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
542 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000543
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000544- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
545 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
546
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000547- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
548 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
549 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
550 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
551 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
552
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000553- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
554 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
555 about 10% faster.
556
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000557- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
558 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
559
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000560- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
561 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
562 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
563 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
564
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000565New platforms
566-------------
567
568Tests
569-----
570
571Windows
572-------
573
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000574- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
575 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
576 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
577 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
578
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000579- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
580 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
581 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
582
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000583Mac
584----
585
586
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000587What's New in Python 2.3 final?
588===============================
589
590*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
591
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000592IDLE
593----
594
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000595- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
596 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
597 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
598 context-menu actions.
599
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000600- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
601 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
602 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
603 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
604 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
605 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
606 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
607 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
608 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
609
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000610
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000611What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
612=============================================
613
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000614*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000615
616Core and builtins
617-----------------
618
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000619- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000620 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000621 comment at the end are still unsupported.
622
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000623Extension modules
624-----------------
625
626- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
627 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
628 than once. This has been fixed.
629
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000630- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
631 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
632 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
633 call.
634
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000635- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
636
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000637Library
638-------
639
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000640- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
641 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
642
643- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
644 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
645 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
646 restored.
647
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000648IDLE
649----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000650
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000651- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000652
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000653Build
654-----
655
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000656- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
657 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
658
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000659C API
660-----
661
662Windows
663-------
664
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000665- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
666 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
667
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000668- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
669
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000670Mac
671---
672
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000673- Various fixes to pimp.
674
675- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
676
677- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
678 more problems than it solves.
679
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000680
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000681What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
682=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000683
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000684*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
685
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000686Core and builtins
687-----------------
688
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000689- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
690 by sys.setcheckinterval().
691
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000692- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
693 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000694 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000695
696- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
697 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
698 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000699 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000700
701- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
702 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000703
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000704- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
705 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
706 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
707
708- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000709 770247.
710
711- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000712
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000713Extension modules
714-----------------
715
716- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
717 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
718
719- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
720
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000721- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
722
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000723- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
724 contained within the _strptime module.
725
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000726- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
727 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
728
729- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000730 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
731
732- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
733 the find_class attribute, if present.
734
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000735- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000736
737 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
738 (SF bug 763298).
739
740 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000741 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
742 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
743 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000744
745 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
746
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000747Library
748-------
749
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000750- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
751
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000752- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
753 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
754 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
755 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
756 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
757 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
758 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
759 or Tester().
760
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000761- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
762 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
763 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
764 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
765 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
766 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
767 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
768 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
769 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000770
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000771 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000772
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000773- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
774 weren't before was an oversight.
775
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000776- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
777 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
778
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000779- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
780 when there are no lines.
781
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000782- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
783 which could occur with Tk 8.4
784
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000785- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
786 to child processes.
787
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000788- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
789
790- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
791
792- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
793 xmlrpclib.
794
795- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
796 responses.
797
798- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
799 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
800
801- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
802 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
803 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
804
805- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
806 used as patterns.
807
808- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
809 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
810 than Tk 8.3.
811
812- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
813
814- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000815
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000816Tools/Demos
817-----------
818
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000819- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
820
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000821- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
822
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000823- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000824
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000825Build
826-----
827
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000828- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
829
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000830- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
831
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000832- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
833 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000834
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000835- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
836 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
837 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000838
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000839C API
840-----
841
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000842- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
843 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
844
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000845Windows
846-------
847
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000848- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
849 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
850 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
851 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
852 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
853 Python exception ::
854
855 thread.error: can't start new thread
856
857 is raised now.
858
859- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
860 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
861 instead of from DLL teardown.
862
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000863Mac
864---
865
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000866- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000867 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000868 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
869 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
870 the executable in the bundle.
871
872- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000873
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000874- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
875
876- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
877 on Panther.
878
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000879What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
880================================
881
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000882*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000883
884Core and builtins
885-----------------
886
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000887- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
888 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
889 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
890 with the -i option.
891
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000892- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
893 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
894
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000895- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
896 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
897
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000898- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
899 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
900 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
901 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
902 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
903 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
904 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
905 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
906 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
907 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
908 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
909 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
910 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000911
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000912- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
913 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
914 embedded in a lambda expression.
915
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000916- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
917 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
918 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
919 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
920 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
921
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000922- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
923 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
924 matches the restriction on classic classes.
925
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000926- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
927 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
928
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000929- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
930 It's writable again.
931
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000932- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
933 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
934 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000935 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000936
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000937- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
938 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
939 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
940
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000941Extension modules
942-----------------
943
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000944- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
945 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
946
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000947- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
948 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
949 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
950 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
951
952- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
953 collection.
954
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000955- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
956 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
957 unique within a single program run.
958
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000959- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
960 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
961
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000962- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
963 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
964
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000965- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
966 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000967
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000968- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
969
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000970- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
971 Fixes SF bug #730685.
972
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000973- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
974 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
975 for many BSD-derived systems.
976
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000977
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000978Library
979-------
980
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000981- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
982 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
983 primary ones:
984
985 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
986 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
987 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
988
989 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
990 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
991 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
992 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
993 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
994 framework features (which doctest lacks).
995
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000996- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
997 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
998 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
999 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1000 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1001 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1002 argument.
1003
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001004- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1005 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1006 in the archive.
1007
1008- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1009 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1010
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001011- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1012 569574).
1013
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001014- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1015 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1016 no more.
1017
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001018- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1019 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1020 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1021 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1022 code coverage.
1023
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001024- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1025 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1026 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001027 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1028 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001029
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001030- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1031 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1032 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001033 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001034
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001035- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1036
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001037- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1038 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1039 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1040 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1041
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001042- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1043 handling.
1044
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001045- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1046 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1047
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001048- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1049 in socket.py.
1050
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001051- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1052
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001053- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1054 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1055 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1056 opener with proxy support.
1057
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001058- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1059
1060- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1061
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001062Tools/Demos
1063-----------
1064
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001065- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1066
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001067- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1068
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001069- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1070 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001071
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001072- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1073 files.
1074
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001075Build
1076-----
1077
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001078- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001079 different root directory.
1080
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001081C API
1082-----
1083
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001084- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1085 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1086 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1087 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1088 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1089 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1090 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1091 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1092 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1093 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1094
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001095- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1096 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1097 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1098 from Python.
1099
1100
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001101New platforms
1102-------------
1103
1104None this time.
1105
1106Tests
1107-----
1108
1109- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1110 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1111
1112Windows
1113-------
1114
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001115- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1116
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001117- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1118 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1119 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1120 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1121 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1122 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1123 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1124 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1125 that's what it's for.
1126
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001127Mac
1128---
1129
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001130- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1131 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1132 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1133 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001134- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1135 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1136- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001137
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001138SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1139------------------------------------
1140
1141430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1142598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1143622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1144661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1145683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1146697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1147713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1148724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1149727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1150729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1151730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1152731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1153732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1154733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1155735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1156740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1157744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1158745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1159747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1160749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1161751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1162753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1163755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1164757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1165760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1166
1167
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001168What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1169================================
1170
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001171*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001172
1173Core and builtins
1174-----------------
1175
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001176- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1177 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1178
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001179- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1180 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1181 and cannot be strings).
1182
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001183- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1184 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1185 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1186 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1187
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001188- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1189 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1190 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1191 Python itself.
1192
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001193- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1194 the referenced object, if it has one.
1195
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001196- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1197 the thread started at
1198 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1199
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001200- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1201 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1202 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1203 placed on a list index.
1204
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001205- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1206 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1207 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1208 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1209
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001210- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1211 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1212 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1213 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1214 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1215 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1216 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1217
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001218- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1219 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1220 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1221 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1222 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1223
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001224- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1225 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001226
1227- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1228 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1229 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1230 #693195.)
1231
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001232- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1233 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001234
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001235- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001236 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001237 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1238 interpreter executions, would fail.
1239
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001240- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001241 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001242 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001243
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001244Extension modules
1245-----------------
1246
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001247- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1248 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1249 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1250 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1251
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001252- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1253 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1254
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001255- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1256 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1257 and Greg Chapman.)
1258
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001259- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1260 recursively.
1261
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001262- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001263 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1264 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1265 leaks.
1266
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001267- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1268
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001269- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1270 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1271 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1272 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1273 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1274 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1275 #705836.
1276
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001277- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001278 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1279
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001280- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1281 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1282 See SF bug #692416.
1283
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001284- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1285 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1286
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001287- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1288 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1289 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001290
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001291- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001292 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1293 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1294
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001295- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1296 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1297 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1298 timeouts to work properly.
1299
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001300Library
1301-------
1302
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001303- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1304 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1305 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1306 future release.
1307
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001308- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1309 for querying platform dependent features.
1310
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001311- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001312
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001313- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1314 pickle protocol versions.
1315
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001316- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1317 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1318 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1319
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001320- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1321
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001322- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1323 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1324 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1325 modules.
1326
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001327- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1328 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1329 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1330
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001331- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1332 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1333
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001334- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1335 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1336 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1337
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001338- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001339 MS Office extensions.
1340
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001341- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1342 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1343
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001344- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1345 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1346
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001347- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1348 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1349 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1350 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1351 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1352 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1353
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001354- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1355 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1356 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001357
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001358- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1359 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1360 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1361
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001362- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1363
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001364- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1365 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1366 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1367
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001368Tools/Demos
1369-----------
1370
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001371- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1372 See the module docstring for details.
1373
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001374Build
1375-----
1376
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001377- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1378 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001379
1380C API
1381-----
1382
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001383- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1384
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001385- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1386 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1387 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1388
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001389- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1390 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001391
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001392 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1393 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1394 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001395
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001396- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001397 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1398
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001399- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1400 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1401 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001402
1403New platforms
1404-------------
1405
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001406None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001407
1408Tests
1409-----
1410
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001411- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1412 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001413
1414Windows
1415-------
1416
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001417- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1418 function.
1419
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001420- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1421 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001422
1423Mac
1424---
1425
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001426- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1427 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001428
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001429- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1430 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001431
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001432- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1433 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1434 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001435
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001436- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001437 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1438 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001439
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001440- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1441 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001442
1443
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001444What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1445=================================
1446
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001447*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001448
1449Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001450-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001451
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001452- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1453 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1454 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1455
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001456- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1457 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1458 (SF patch #664376.)
1459
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001460- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1461 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1462 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1463 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1464 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1465 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001466 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001467
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001468- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1469 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1470 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1471 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001472 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001473
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001474- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1475 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1476 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1477 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1478 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1479 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1480 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1481 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1482 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1483 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1484 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1485
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001486- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1487 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1488 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1489 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1490 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1491 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1492
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001493- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1494 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1495
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001496- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1497 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1498 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1499 case.)
1500
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001501- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1502 passed as unicode strings.
1503
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001504- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1505 See SF bug #683467.
1506
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001507- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1508 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1509
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001510- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1511
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001512- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1513
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001514- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1515 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1516 arguments.
1517
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001518- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1519 See SF bug #667147.
1520
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001521- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001522 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001523 See SF bug #676155.
1524
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001525- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001526 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001527 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1528 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1529 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1530 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1531 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1532 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001533
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001534Extension modules
1535-----------------
1536
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001537- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1538 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1539 tp_as_number pointer.
1540
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001541- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1542 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1543 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1544 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1545 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1546
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001547- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1548
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001549- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1550
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001551- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001552 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001553 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1554 patch #678531.)
1555
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001556- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1557 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1558
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001559- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1560 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1561
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001562- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1563
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001564- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1565 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1566 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1567
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001568- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1569
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001570- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1571 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1572
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001573- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001574
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001575- datetime changes:
1576
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001577 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1578
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001579 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1580 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1581 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1582 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1583 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1584 now.
1585
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001586 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001587 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1588 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001589
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001590 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001591 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001592 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1593 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1594 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1595 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001596
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001597 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1598 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1599 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001600 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1601
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001602 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1603 by a later example coded by Guido.
1604
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001605 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001606 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1607 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1608 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001609 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1610 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1611
1612 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1613 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1614 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1615 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1616 tzinfo subclass instance.
1617
1618 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1619 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1620 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1621 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1622 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1623 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1624 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1625 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001626
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001627 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1628 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1629 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1630 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1631 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001632 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1633
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001634 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001635
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001636 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1637 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1638 as a naive datetime object.
1639
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001640 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1641 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1642 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1643
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001644 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1645 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1646 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1647 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1648 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1649 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1650 comparison.
1651
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001652 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1653 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1654 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1655 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001656 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001657
1658 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001659
1660 and ::
1661
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001662 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1663
1664 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1665 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1666 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1667 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1668
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001669 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1670 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1671 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1672 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1673 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1674
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001675 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1676 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001677 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1678 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001679
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001680Library
1681-------
1682
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001683- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1684 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1685
1686- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1687 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1688 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1689 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1690 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1691 See PEP 307 for details.
1692
1693- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1694 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1695
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001696- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1697 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001698 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001699 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1700 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001701 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001702
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001703- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1704 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1705
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001706- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1707 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1708 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1709
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001710- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1711
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001712- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1713 exception.
1714
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001715- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1716 class.
1717
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001718- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1719 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1720 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1721
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001722- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1723 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1724
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001725- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001726 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1727 See SF bug #659228.
1728
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001729- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1730 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1731 See SF patch #651082.
1732
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001733- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001734
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001735- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1736 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1737
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001738- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001739 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001740
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001741- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1742 DOS paths from other platforms.
1743
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001744Tools/Demos
1745-----------
1746
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001747- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1748 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1749 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1750 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1751 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1752 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1753 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1754 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1755 example:
1756
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001757 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1758 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001759
1760 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1761
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001762
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001763Build
1764-----
1765
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001766- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1767 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1768 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001769 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1770
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001771 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1772
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001773- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1774 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1775 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1776 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1777 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1778 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1779 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1780 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1781 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1782
1783- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1784 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1785 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1786 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1787
1788- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1789 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1790
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001791C API
1792-----
1793
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001794- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1795 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001796
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001797- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1798 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1799 tp_as_number pointer.
1800
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001801- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1802 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1803 (SF #681367)
1804
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001805- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1806 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1807 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1808 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001809
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001810Tests
1811-----
1812
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001813- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001814 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1815 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1816 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1817 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1818 pydoc.)
1819
1820- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1821
1822- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001823
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001824Windows
1825-------
1826
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001827- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1828 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1829 time).
1830
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001831- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1832 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1833
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001834- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1835 release without strong cryptography.
1836
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001837- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001838 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001839
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001840- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1841 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1842
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001843Mac
1844---
1845
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001846- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1847 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001848
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001849- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1850 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1851 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001852
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001853- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1854 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001855
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001856- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1857 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1858 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1859 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001860
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001861- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001862 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1863 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1864 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001865
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001866
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001867What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001868=================================
1869
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001870*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001871
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001872Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001873--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001874
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001875- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1876
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001877- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1878 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001879 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001880 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001881 a different meaning than before.
1882
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001883- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001884 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001885 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001886
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001887- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001888 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001889 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001890
1891- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1892 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1893 and deallocation.
1894
1895- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1896 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1897
1898- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1899 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1900 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1901 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1902 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1903
1904- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1905 now detected by the garbage collector.
1906
1907- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1908 [SF bug 519621]
1909
1910- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1911 identifier.
1912
1913- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1914 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1915 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1916 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1917 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1918 [SF bug 563060]
1919
1920- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1921 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1922 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1923 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1924 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1925
1926- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1927 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1928 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1929
1930- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1931
1932- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1933 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1934 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1935 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1936 state of the slots would be lost.)
1937
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001938Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001939-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001940
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001941- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001942 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1943 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1944 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1945 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001946 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1947 Jython 2.1.
1948
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001949- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001950 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001951 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1952 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1953 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1954 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1955 these, see PEP 302.
1956
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001957- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1958 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1959 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1960
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001961- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1962 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1963 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1964
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001965- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1966 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1967 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1968
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001969- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1970 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1971 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1972 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1973 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1974 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1975 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1976 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1977 releases or implementations.
1978
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001979- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001980 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1981 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001982
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001983- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1984 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1985
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001986- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1987 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1988 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1989
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001990- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1991 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1992
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001993- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1994 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001995 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1996 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001997
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001998- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1999 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2000 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2001 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2002 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2003
2004 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2005 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2006 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2007 pattern.
2008
2009 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2010 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2011 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2012 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2013
2014 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2015 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2016 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2017 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2018 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2019 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2020
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002021- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2022 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2023 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2024 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2025 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2026 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2027 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2028 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002029
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002030- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2031 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2032 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2033 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2034 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002035 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2036 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2037 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2038 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2039 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2040 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2041 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002042
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002043- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2044 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2045
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002046- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2047 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2048 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2049 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2050 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2051 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2052 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2053 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2054 to Zack Weinberg!
2055
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002056- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2057 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2058 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2059 type. This has been fixed now.
2060
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002061- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2062 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2063 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2064
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002065- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2066 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2067 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2068 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2069 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2070 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2071 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2072 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002073 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002074
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002075- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2076 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2077 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002078
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002079- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2080 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2081 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2082 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2083 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2084 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2085 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2086 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002087 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002088 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2089 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2090
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002091- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2092 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2093 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2094 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2095 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2096 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2097 this.)
2098
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002099- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2100 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002101 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002102 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002103 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2104 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002105 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2106 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002107
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002108- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2109 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2110 currently running.
2111
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002112- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2113 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2114 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2115 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2116
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002117- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2118 as directory names.
2119
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002120- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2121 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2122
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002123- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2124 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2125
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002126- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002127 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2128 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002129
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002130- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2131 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2132 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2133 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2134 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2135
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002136- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2137 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2138 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2139 removed.
2140
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002141- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2142 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2143 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2144
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002145- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2146 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2147 to __debug__.
2148
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002149- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2150 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2151 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2152
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002153- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2154 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2155 deprecated now.
2156
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002157- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2158 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2159 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002160
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002161- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2162 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2163 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2164 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2165 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002166
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002167- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2168 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2169
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002170- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2171 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2172 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002173 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002174 is backward compatible.
2175
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002176- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2177 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2178 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2179 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2180 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2181
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002182- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2183 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2184 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2185 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2186 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2187 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002188
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002189- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2190 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2191
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002192- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2193 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2194
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002195- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2196 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2197 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2198 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2199 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2200
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002201- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2202 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2203 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2204
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002205- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002206 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2207
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002208- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2209 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2210 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002211
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002212- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2213 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2214
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002215- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2216 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2217 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2218
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002219- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2220
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002221Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002222-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002223
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002224- Added three operators to the operator module:
2225 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2226 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2227 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2228
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002229- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2230
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002231- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2232 archives.
2233
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002234- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2235 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2236 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2237
2238 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2239
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002240- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2241 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2242 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002243 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002244
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002245- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2246 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2247 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2248 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002249 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2250 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2251 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2252 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002253
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002254- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2255 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002256
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002257- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2258
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002259- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2260 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2261
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002262- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2263 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2264 supported.
2265
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002266- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2267
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002268- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2269 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002270
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002271- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2272 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2273
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002274- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2275
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002276- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2277 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2278
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002279- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2280 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2281 functions but callable type objects.
2282
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002283- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002284 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002285 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002286
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002287- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2288 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002289
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002290- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2291 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002292
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002293- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2294 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2295 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2296 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2297
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002298- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2299 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002300
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002301- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2302 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2303 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2304 and __imul__.
2305
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002306- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002307 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2308 is called.
2309
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002310- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2311 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2312 interpreter was compiled.
2313
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002314- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2315 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2316 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002317 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002318 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2319 1, not 2.
2320
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002321- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2322 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2323 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2324 limit.
2325
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002326- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2327 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2328 bug #623464.
2329
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002330- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2331 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2332 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2333 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2334
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002335Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002336-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002337
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002338- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2339
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002340- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2341 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2342 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2343 with Python 2.3a2.
2344
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002345- os.path exposes getctime.
2346
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002347- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002348 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002349 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002350 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002351 unit tests of floating point results.
2352
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002353- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2354 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2355 has been increased.
2356
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002357- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2358 executed.
2359
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002360- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2361 postinstallation script.
2362
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002363- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2364 test the current module.
2365
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002366- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002367 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2368 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2369 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2370 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2371
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002372- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002373 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002374 Ward's Optik package.
2375
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002376- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2377 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2378 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2379 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2380
2381- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2382 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002383 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002384
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002385- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2386 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2387 shelf are binary pickles.
2388
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002389- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2390 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2391
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002392- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2393 modules are iterators now.
2394
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002395- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2396 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2397 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2398 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2399 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2400 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002401
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002402- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2403 with their entity value.
2404
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002405- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2406
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002407- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2408 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002409
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002410- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2411 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002412 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002413
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002414- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2415 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2416 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2417 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2418 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2419 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2420 main():
2421
2422 import locale
2423 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2424
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002425- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2426 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2427
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002428- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2429 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2430 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2431 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2432 to the new standard.
2433
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002434- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2435 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2436 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2437 an extension to the database.
2438
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002439- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2440 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2441 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2442 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002443 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002444
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002445- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002446 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002447
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002448- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2449 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2450 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2451 bounded integers.
2452
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002453- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2454 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2455 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2456 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2457 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2458 in existence.
2459
2460 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2461 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2462 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2463 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2464 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2465 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2466
2467 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2468 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2469 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2470 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2471
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002472- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2473 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2474 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2475
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002476- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2477
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002478- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2479 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2480 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2481 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2482
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002483- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2484 argument.
2485
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002486- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2487 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2488 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2489 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2490 [SF patch 560794].
2491
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002492- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2493 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2494 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002495 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2496 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2497 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002498
2499- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2500 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002501
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002502- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2503 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2504 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2505 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002506
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002507- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2508 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2509 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2510 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2511 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2512
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002513- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002514
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002515- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2516
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002517- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2518 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2519 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2520 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2521 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2522 identical to None.
2523
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002524- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2525 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2526 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2527 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2528 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2529 results now.
2530
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002531- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2532 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2533
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002534- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2535 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2536 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2537 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2538 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2539 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2540 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2541 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2542
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002543- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2544
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002545- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2546 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2547
2548- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2549 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2550 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2551 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2552 and other systems.
2553
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002554- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2555 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2556 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2557 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 +00002558 work well with these.
2559
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002560- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2561
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002562- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002563 connections.
2564
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002565- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2566 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2567 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2568
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002569- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2570 sets
2571
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002572- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2573 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2574 name.
2575
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002576- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2577 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2578 passed in.
2579
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002580- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002581 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002582 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2583 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002584
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002585- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2586
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002587- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2588
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002589- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2590 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2591 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2592
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002593- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2594 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2595 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2596 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002597 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002598
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002599- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002600 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002601 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002602
2603- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2604 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2605 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2606
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002607- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002608 the value of its expression argument.
2609
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002610- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2611 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2612 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2613
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002614- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2615 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2616 skipstone browser was included.
2617
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002618- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2619 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2620
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002621Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002622-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002623
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002624- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2625 names in addition to accepting file names.
2626
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002627- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2628 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2629 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2630 still used and useful.)
2631
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002632- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2633 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2634 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2635 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002636
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002637- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2638 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2639 the generated binary.
2640
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002641Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002642-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002643
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002644- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2645
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002646- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2647 except in the hands of experts.
2648
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002649- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002650 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2651 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2652 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002653
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002654- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2655 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2656 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2657 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2658 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2659 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2660 builds.
2661
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002662- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2663 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2664 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2665 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2666 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2667 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2668 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2669 new type.
2670
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002671- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002672
2673 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2674 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2675 positive infinities.
2676
2677 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2678 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2679 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2680 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2681 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2682 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2683 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2684
2685 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2686
2687 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2688
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002689- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2690 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2691 size of the executable.
2692
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002693- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2694 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2695 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2696 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002697
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002698- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2699
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002700- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2701 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2702 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002703
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002704- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2705 well as Unix.
2706
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002707- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2708 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2709 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2710 modules in the README file for details.
2711
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002712C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002713-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002714
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002715- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2716 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002717 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002718 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002719 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002720
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002721- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2722 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2723 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2724 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2725 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2726 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002727 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002728 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2729 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2730 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2731 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2732 aligned.)
2733
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002734- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2735 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2736 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2737
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002738- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2739 level.
2740
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002741- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2742 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2743 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2744 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2745 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2746
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002747- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2748 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2749 code.
2750
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002751- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2752 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2753 adjusting for negative indices.
2754
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002755- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2756 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2757 object.
2758
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002759- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2760 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2761 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2762
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002763- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2764 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002765
2766- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2767
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002768- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2769 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2770 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2771 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2772
2773- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2774
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002775- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002776
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002777- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002778 without going through the buffer API.
2779
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002780- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002781
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002782- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2783 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2784 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2785 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2786
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002787- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2788 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2789
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002790- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002791 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2792
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002793New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002794-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002795
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002796- OpenVMS is now supported.
2797
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002798- AtheOS is now supported.
2799
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002800- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2801
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002802- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2803
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002804Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002805-----
2806
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002807- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2808 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2809 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002810
2811Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002812-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002813
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002814- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2815 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2816 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2817 bugs.
2818 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002819 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002820 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2821 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002822 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002823
2824- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002825 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002826
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002827- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2828 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2829
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002830- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2831 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002832 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002833 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2834
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002835- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2836 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2837 use files" uninstall option).
2838
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002839- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2840
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002841- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2842 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2843
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002844- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2845 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2846 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2847
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002848- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2849 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2850 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2851 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2852 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002853 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2854 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2855 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002856
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002857- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002858 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002859 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2860 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2861 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2862 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2863 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2864 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2865 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2866 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2867 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2868 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2869 work around.
2870
2871- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2872 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2873 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2874 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2875 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2876 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2877 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2878 specified with O_CREAT too).
2879
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002880Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002881----
2882
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002883- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002884
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002885- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2886 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2887 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2888
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002889- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2890 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2891 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2892
2893- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2894 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2895 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2896 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2897 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2898 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2899 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2900 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002901
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002902- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2903 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2904 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002905
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002906- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2907 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2908 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2909 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2910 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002911
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002912- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2913 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2914 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002915
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002916- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2917 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002918
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002919- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2920 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2921 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2922 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2923 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002924
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002925- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2926 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2927 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2928
2929- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2930 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2931 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002932
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002933- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2934 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2935 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2936 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002937 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002938
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002939- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2940 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002941
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002942- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2943 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002944
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002945- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002946 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002947 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2948 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002949
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002950
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002951What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002952===============================
2953
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002954*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2955
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002956Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002957--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002958
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002959- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2960 with a custom metaclass.
2961
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002962Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002963-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002964
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002965- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2966 are proxies.
2967
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002968Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002969-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002970
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002971- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2972 very short strings.
2973
2974- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2975 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2976 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2977 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2978 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2979
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002980Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002981-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002982
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002983- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2984 close or delete time).
2985
2986- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2987 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2988
2989- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2990
2991- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002992 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002993
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002994Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002995-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002996
2997Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002998-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002999
3000C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003001-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003002
3003New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003004-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003005
3006Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003007-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003008
3009Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003010-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003011
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003012- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3013
3014- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3015 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3016
3017- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3018 deleted at process exit time.
3019
3020- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3021 in backslash.
3022
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003023Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003024----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003025
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003026- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3027 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3028 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3029
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003030
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003031What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003032===========================
3033
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003034*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3035
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003036Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003037--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003038
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003039- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3040 been extensively updated. See
3041
3042 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3043
3044 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3045
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003046- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3047 deleted!
3048
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003049- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3050 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3051 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3052 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3053 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3054
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003055- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3056
3057 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3058 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3059
3060 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3061 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3062 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3063 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3064 supported anyway.
3065
3066 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3067 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3068
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003069- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3070 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3071 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3072 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3073 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003074
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003075- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3076 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3077 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3078
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003079Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003080-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003081
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003082- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3083 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3084 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3085 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3086 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3087 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003088 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3089 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3090 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3091 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003092
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003093- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3094 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3095 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3096
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003097Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003098-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003099
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003100- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3101
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003102Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003103-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003104
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003105- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3106 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3107 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3108 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3109 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3110 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3111
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003112- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3113
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003114- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3115
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003116- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3117
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003118- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3119 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3120 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3121
3122- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3123
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003124Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003125-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003126
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003127- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3128 off a search on Google.
3129
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003130Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003131-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003132
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003133- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3134 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3135 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3136 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3137 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3138 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3139 other platforms should do likewise.
3140
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003141- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3142 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3143 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3144
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003145C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003146-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003147
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003148- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3149 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3150 producing key-value pairs.
3151
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003152- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003153 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003154 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3155 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3156 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3157 previously went unchallenged.
3158
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003159New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003160-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003161
3162Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003163-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003164
3165Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003166-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003167
3168Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003169----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003170
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003171- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3172 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003173
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003174- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3175 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3176 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3177 home.
3178
3179
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003180What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003181===========================
3182
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003183*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3184
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003185Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003186--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003187
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003188- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3189 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003190
3191 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003192 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003193
3194 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3195 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003196 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003197 This needs to be documented.
3198
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003199- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3200 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3201
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003202- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3203 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3204 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3205
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003206- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3207 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3208
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003209- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3210 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3211 class forbids it).
3212
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003213- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3214 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3215 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3216
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003217- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3218
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003219Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003220-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003221
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003222- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3223 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003224 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003225
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003226- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3227 (like 1 + '').
3228
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003229Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003230-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003231
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003232- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3233 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3234 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3235 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003236 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003237 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3238
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003239- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3240 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3241 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3242 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3243
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003244- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3245 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003246 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3247 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3248 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003249
3250- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3251 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003252
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003253- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3254 bytes on its input.
3255
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003256Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003257-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003258
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003259- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003260 convenience function.
3261
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003262- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3263 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3264 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003265 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3266 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3267 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3268 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3269 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3270 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003271
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003272- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3273 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3274 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3275 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3276
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003277- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3278 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3279 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3280
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003281- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3282 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3283 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3284 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3285
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003286- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3287 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003288 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003289 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3290 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3291 new -l and -e options.
3292
3293- statcache is now deprecated.
3294
3295- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3296 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003297 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003298 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3299 time properly taken into account.
3300
3301- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3302 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3303 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3304 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3305
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003306Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003307-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003308
3309Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003310-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003311
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003312- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3313 is built with libdb3 if available.
3314
3315- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3316
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003317C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003318-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003319
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003320- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3321 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3322 PySequence_Size().
3323
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003324- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3325
3326- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3327 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3328 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3329
3330- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3331 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3332
3333- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3334 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3335
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003336New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003337-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003338
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003339- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3340 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3341
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003342- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3343 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3344
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003345- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3346
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003347Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003348-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003349
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003350- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3351 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3352
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003353Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003354-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003355
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003356Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003357----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003358
3359- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3360 removed completely in the next release.
3361
3362- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3363 OSX.
3364
3365- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3366 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3367
3368- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3369
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003370
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003371What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003372===========================
3373
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003374*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3375
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003376Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003377--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003378
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003379- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003380 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003381 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003382 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3383 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003384 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3385 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003386 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3387 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003388
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003389- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3390 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3391
3392- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3393 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3394
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003395Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003396-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003397
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003398- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3399 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3400 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3401 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3402 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3403 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3404 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3405 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3406
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003407- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3408 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3409 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3410 example).
3411
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003412- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003413 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003414 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003415 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003416
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003417- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3418 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3419 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003420 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003421
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003422- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3423 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3424 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3425 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3426 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3427 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3428
3429 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3430
3431 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3432
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003433Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003434-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003435
3436- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3437
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003438- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3439
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003440- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3441 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003442
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003443- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3444 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3445 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3446 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3447 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3448 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003449 attributes.
3450
3451- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3452 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3453 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003454
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003455- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3456 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3457 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003458
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003459- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3460 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3461 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003462 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3463 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3464
3465- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3466 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003467
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003468Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003469-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003470
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003471- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3472 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3473
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003474- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3475 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3476 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3477 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3478
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003479- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3480 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3481 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3482 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3483
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003484 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3485 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3486 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3487 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3488 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3489 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3490 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3491 without losing information).
3492
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003493- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003494 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3495 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3496 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3497 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3498 module).
3499
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003500 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003501 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3502 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3503 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3504 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003505
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003506- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003507 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3508 encoding.
3509
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003510- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3511 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3512
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003513- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003514 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3515
3516- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3517 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3518 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3519 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3520
3521- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3522
3523- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3524 ON, and OFF.
3525
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003526- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3527 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3528
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003529Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003530-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003531
3532- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3533 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3534 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003535
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003536- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3537 been added: -X and -E.
3538
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003539Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003540-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003541
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003542- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3543 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3544
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003545C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003546-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003547
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003548- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3549 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3550 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3551 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3552 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3553
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003554- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3555 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3556 as long) arguments.
3557
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003558- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3559 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3560 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3561 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3562 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3563 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3564
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003565- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3566 input.
3567
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003568New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003569-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003570
3571Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003572-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003573
3574Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003575-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003576
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003577- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3578 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3579 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3580
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003581- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3582 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3583 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003584 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003585
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003586 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3587 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3588 import signal
3589 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003590
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003591 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003592 while 1:
3593 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003594 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003595 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3596 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3597 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3598 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003599
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003600
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003601What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3602===========================
3603
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003604*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3605
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003606Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003607--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003608
3609- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3610 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3611 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3612
3613- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3614 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3615 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3616 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3617 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3618 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3619 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003620
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003621- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003622 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003623 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3624 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3625 associate a docstring with a property.
3626
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003627- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3628 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3629 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3630 other built-in object types.
3631
3632- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3633 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3634 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3635 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3636 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3637
3638- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3639 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3640
3641- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3642 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003643 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003644 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3645 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3646 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3647 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3648 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3649
3650- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3651 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3652 class.
3653
3654- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3655 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3656 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3657 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3658
3659- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3660 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3661 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3662 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3663
3664- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3665 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3666
3667- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3668 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3669 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3670 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3671 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003672 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003673 with the same value as s.
3674
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003675- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3676
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003677Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003678----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003679
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003680- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3681
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003682- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3683 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3684 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3685 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3686 objects.
3687
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003688- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3689 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003690 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3691 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3692
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003693- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3694 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3695 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3696
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003697Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003698-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003699
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003700- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3701 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3702 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3703 by the instances.
3704
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003705- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3706 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3707 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3708
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003709- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3710 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3711 before the entire comparison is complete.
3712
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003713- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3714 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3715 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3716
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003717- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3718 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3719 getwriter().
3720
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003721- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3722 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3723
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003724- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003725 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3726 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3727
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003728- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3729 iterable object.
3730
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003731- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3732 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003733
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003734- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3735 authentication.
3736
3737- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3738 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003739
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003740- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003741 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3742 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3743 a sample driver.)
3744
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003745Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003746-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003747
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003748- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3749 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3750 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3751 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3752 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3753 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3754 kernel has large file support.
3755
3756- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3757 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3758 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3759 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3760 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3761
3762- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3763 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3764 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3765
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003766C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003767-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003768
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003769- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3770 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3771
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003772New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003773-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003774
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003775- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3776 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3777
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003778Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003779-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003780
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003781- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3782 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3783 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3784 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3785 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3786
3787- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3788 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3789 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3790 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3791
3792- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3793 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3794
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003795Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003796-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003797
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003798- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003799 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3800 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003801
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003802
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003803What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3804===========================
3805
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003806*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3807
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003808Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003809----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003810
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003811- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3812 big to represent as a C double.
3813
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003814- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3815 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3816 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3817 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3818 restriction).
3819
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003820- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3821 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3822 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3823 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3824 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3825
3826 >>> dir([])
3827 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3828 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3829 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3830 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3831 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3832 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3833 'reverse', 'sort']
3834
3835 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3836
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003837- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003838 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3839 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3840 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3841 OverflowError exception.
3842
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003843- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003844 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003845 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3846 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3847 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3848 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3849 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003850 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003851 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3852 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3853
3854 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3855 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3856 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3857 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003858
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003859- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003860 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3861 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3862 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3863 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3864 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3865 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3866 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3867 once it is created.
3868
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003869- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3870 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3871 (key, value) pairs.
3872
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003873- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003874 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3875 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3876
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003877- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3878 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3879 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3880 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3881 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003882
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003883- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003884 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3885 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3886
3887 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3888
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003889- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003890 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3891
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003892Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003893-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003894
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003895- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003896 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3897 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003898
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003899- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3900 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3901 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3902 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3903 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3904 in this area anymore).
3905
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003906- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3907 threading.Timer.
3908
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003909- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3910 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3911
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003912- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003913 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3914
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003915- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003916 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3917 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3918 converted to Python longs.
3919
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003920- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003921 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3922
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003923- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3924 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3925 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3926
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003927Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003928-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003929
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003930- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3931 division operators as per PEP 238.
3932
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003933Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003934-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003935
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003936- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3937 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3938 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3939 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3940
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003941C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003942-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003943
3944- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003945
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003946- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3947 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003948 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003949
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003950 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3951 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003952 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003953 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003954
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003955- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003956 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3957 module:
3958
3959 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003960
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003961 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3962 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003963
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003964 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3965 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003966
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003967 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3968
3969 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3970
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003971- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003972 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3973 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3974 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003975
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003976New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003977-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003978
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003979- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3980 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3981 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3982 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3983 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003984
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003985Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003986-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003987
3988Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003989-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003990
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003991- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3992 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3993 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3994 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003995 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3996 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3997 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3998 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3999 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004000
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004001- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004002 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4003
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004004
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004005What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4006===========================
4007
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004008*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4009
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004010Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004011-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004012
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004013- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4014 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4015
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004016- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4017 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4018 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004019
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004020- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4021 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4022 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4023 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004024
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004025- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4026
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004027- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004028
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004029Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004030-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004031
4032- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004033 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004034 the module docstring for details.
4035
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004036Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004037-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004038
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004039- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004040 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4041 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4042 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004043
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004044- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4045 Nick Mathewson.
4046
4047Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004048----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004049
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004050- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4051 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4052 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4053 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4054 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4055 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4056 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4057 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4058
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004059- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4060 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4061 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4062 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4063
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004064- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4065 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4066 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4067 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4068 come a long way).
4069
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004070- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4071 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4072 write filters for these warnings).
4073
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004074- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4075 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4076 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4077 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4078 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4079
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004080- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4081 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4082 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4083 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4084 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4085 older distribution.
4086
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004087Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004088-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004089
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004090- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4091 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004092 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004093
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004094- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4095 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4096 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4097
4098- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4099
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004100- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4101
4102- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4103
4104- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4105
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004106- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004107
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004108- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4109
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004110New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004111-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004112
4113C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004114-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004115
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004116- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4117 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4118 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4119 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4120 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4121 against buffer overruns.
4122
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004123- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004124 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4125 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004126 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4127 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4128 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4129
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004130- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4131 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4132 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4133 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4134 deprecated.
4135
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004136Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004137-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004138
4139- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4140 relevant is found.
4141
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004142
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004143What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004144===========================
4145
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4147
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004148Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004149----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004150
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004151- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4152 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4153 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4154 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4155 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4156 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4157 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4158 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004159 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004160 repaired.
4161
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004162- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004163 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004164 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4165 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4166 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4167 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4168 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4169 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4170 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4171 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4172
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004173- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4174 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4175 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4176 leading BMO character).
4177
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004178- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4179 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4180 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4181
4182 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4183 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4184 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004185
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004186 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4187 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4188 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4189 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4190 for various simple to use conversions.
4191
4192 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4193 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4194
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004195 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4196 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4197 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4198 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4199 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4200 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4201 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4202 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4203 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4204 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4205 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4206 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4207 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4208 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4209 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004210
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004211- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4212 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4213 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004214 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004215 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004216
4217 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004218 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4219 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4220 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4221 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4222 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004223 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4224 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004225
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004226 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4227 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4228 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004229 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004230
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004231- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4232 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4233 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4234 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4235 floating arithmetic,
4236
4237 x = 9007199254740992.0
4238 print long(x)
4239
4240 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4241 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4242 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4243 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4244 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4245 functions are of good quality).
4246
4247 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4248 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4249 algorithms to break.
4250
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004251- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4252 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4253 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4254 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4255 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4256 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4257 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4258 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4259 order.
4260
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004261- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4262 operation along the most common code paths.
4263
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004264- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4265 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4266
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004267- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4268 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4269 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4270 {}.update(UserDict())
4271
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004272- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4273 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4274 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4275 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4276 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4277 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4278 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4279 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4280
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004281- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004282 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004283
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004284 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004285 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4286 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004287 join() method of strings
4288 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004289 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4290 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004291 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004292 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004293
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004294- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4295 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4296
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004297- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4298 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4299
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004300- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4301 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4302 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4303 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4304
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004305- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4306 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004307 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004308 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4309 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004310
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004311- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4312
4313
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004314Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004315-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004316
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004317- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004318 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004319 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4320 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4321
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004322- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4323 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4324
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004325- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4326 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4327 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4328 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4329
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004330- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4331 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4332 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4333
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004334- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4335
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004336- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4337
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004338- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4339 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4340 that are still imported into string.py).
4341
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004342- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4343
4344- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4345 Now it does.
4346
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004347- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4348
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004349- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4350 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4351 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4352 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4353 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004354 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4355 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004356
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004357- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4358 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4359 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4360 'help(object)'.
4361
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004362Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004363-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004364
4365- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004366 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004367 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4368 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4369
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004370- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004371 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4372 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004373
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004374C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004375-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004376
4377- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4378 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004379
4380----
4381
4382**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**