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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
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000011
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +000015- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
16 passed as unicode strings.
17
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +000018- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
19 See SF bug #683467.
20
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +000021- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
22 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
23
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +000024- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
25
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +000026- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
27
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +000028- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
29 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
30 arguments.
31
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +000032- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
33 See SF bug #667147.
34
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +000035- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +000036 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +000037 See SF bug #676155.
38
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +000039- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +000040 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +000041 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
42 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
43 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
44 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
45 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
46 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +000047
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000048Extension modules
49-----------------
50
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +000051- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
52
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +000053- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +000054 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +000055 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
56 patch #678531.)
57
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +000058- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
59 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
60
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +000061- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
62 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
63
Martin v. Löwis9789aef2003-01-26 11:30:36 +000064- A new module _iconv_codec has been added, to expose the iconv(3)
65 library.
66
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +000067- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
68
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +000069- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
70 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
71 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
72
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000073- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
74
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +000075- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
76 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
77
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000078- datetime changes:
79
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +000080 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
81 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
82 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
83 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
84 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
85 now.
86
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000087 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000088 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
89 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000090
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +000091 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000092 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000093 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
94 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
95 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
96 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000097
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000098 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
99 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
100 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000101 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
102
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000103 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
104 by a later example coded by Guido.
105
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000106 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000107 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
108 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
109 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000110 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
111 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
112
113 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
114 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
115 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
116 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
117 tzinfo subclass instance.
118
119 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
120 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
121 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
122 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
123 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
124 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
125 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
126 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000127
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000128 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
129 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
130 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
131 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
132 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
133 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to
134 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
135 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
136 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
137 as a naive datetime object.
138
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000139 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
140 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
141 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
142
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000143 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
144 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
145 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
146 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
147 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
148 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
149 comparison.
150
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000151 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
152 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
153 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
154 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
155 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example,
156
157 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
158 and
159 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
160
161 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
162 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
163 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
164 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
165
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000166 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
167 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
168 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
169 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
170 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
171
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000172 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
173 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000174 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
175 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000176
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000177Library
178-------
179
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000180- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
181 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
182
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000183- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
184 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
185 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
186
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000187- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
188
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000189- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
190 exception.
191
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000192- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
193 class.
194
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000195- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
196 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
197 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
198
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000199- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
200 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
201
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000202- realpath is now exported when doing from poxixpath import *.
203 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
204 See SF bug #659228.
205
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000206- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
207 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
208 See SF patch #651082.
209
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000210- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000211
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000212- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
213 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
214
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000215- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000216 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000217
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000218Tools/Demos
219-----------
220
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000221- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
222 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
223 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
224 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
225 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
226 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
227 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
228 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
229 example:
230
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000231 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
232 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000233
234 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
235
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000236
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000237Build
238-----
239
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000240- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
241 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
242 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
243 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
244 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
245 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
246 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
247 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
248 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
249
250- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
251 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
252 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
253 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
254
255- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
256 from the Tools/scripts directory.
257
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000258C API
259-----
260
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000261- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
262 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
263 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
264 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000265
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000266
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000267New platforms
268-------------
269
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000270TBD
271
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000272Tests
273-----
274
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000275TBD
276
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000277Windows
278-------
279
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000280- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
281 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
282
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000283- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
284 release without strong cryptography.
285
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000286- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
287 absolute pathname.
288
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000289- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
290 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
291
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000292Mac
293---
294
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000295- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
296 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000297
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000298- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
299 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
300 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000301
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000302- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
303 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000304
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000305
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000306What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000307=================================
308
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000309*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000310
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000311Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000312--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000313
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000314- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
315
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000316- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
317 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000318 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000319 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000320 a different meaning than before.
321
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000322- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000323 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000324 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000325
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000326- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000327 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000328 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000329
330- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
331 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
332 and deallocation.
333
334- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
335 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
336
337- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
338 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
339 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
340 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
341 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
342
343- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
344 now detected by the garbage collector.
345
346- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
347 [SF bug 519621]
348
349- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
350 identifier.
351
352- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
353 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
354 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
355 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
356 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
357 [SF bug 563060]
358
359- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
360 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
361 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
362 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
363 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
364
365- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
366 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
367 not called. [SF bug #537450]
368
369- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
370
371- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
372 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
373 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
374 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
375 state of the slots would be lost.)
376
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000377Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000378-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000379
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000380- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000381 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
382 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
383 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
384 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000385 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
386 Jython 2.1.
387
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000388- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000389 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000390 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
391 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
392 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
393 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
394 these, see PEP 302.
395
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000396- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
397 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
398 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
399
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000400- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
401 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
402 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
403
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000404- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
405 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
406 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
407
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000408- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
409 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
410 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
411 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
412 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
413 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
414 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
415 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
416 releases or implementations.
417
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000418- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000419 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
420 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000421
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000422- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
423 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
424
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000425- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
426 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
427 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
428
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000429- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
430 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
431
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000432- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
433 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000434 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
435 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000436
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000437- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
438 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
439 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
440 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
441 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
442
443 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
444 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
445 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
446 pattern.
447
448 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
449 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
450 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
451 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
452
453 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
454 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
455 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
456 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
457 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
458 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
459
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000460- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
461 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
462 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
463 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
464 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
465 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
466 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
467 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000468
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000469- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
470 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
471 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
472 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
473 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000474 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
475 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
476 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
477 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
478 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
479 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
480 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000481
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000482- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
483 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
484
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000485- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
486 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
487 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
488 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
489 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
490 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
491 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
492 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
493 to Zack Weinberg!
494
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000495- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
496 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
497 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
498 type. This has been fixed now.
499
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000500- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
501 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
502 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
503
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000504- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
505 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
506 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
507 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
508 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
509 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
510 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
511 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000512 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000513
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000514- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
515 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
516 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000517
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000518- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
519 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
520 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
521 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
522 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
523 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
524 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
525 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000526 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000527 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
528 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
529
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000530- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
531 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
532 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
533 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
534 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
535 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
536 this.)
537
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000538- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
539 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000540 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000541 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000542 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
543 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000544 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
545 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000546
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000547- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
548 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
549 currently running.
550
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000551- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
552 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
553 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
554 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
555
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000556- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
557 as directory names.
558
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000559- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
560 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
561
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000562- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
563 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
564
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000565- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000566 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
567 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000568
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000569- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
570 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
571 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
572 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
573 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
574
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000575- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
576 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
577 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
578 removed.
579
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000580- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
581 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
582 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
583
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000584- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
585 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
586 to __debug__.
587
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000588- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
589 string to the left with zeros. For example,
590 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
591
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000592- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
593 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
594 deprecated now.
595
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000596- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
597 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
598 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000599
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000600- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
601 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
602 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
603 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
604 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000605
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000606- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
607 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
608
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000609- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
610 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
611 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000612 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000613 is backward compatible.
614
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000615- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
616 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
617 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
618 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
619 could access a pointer to freed memory.
620
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000621- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
622 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
623 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
624 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
625 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
626 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000627
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000628- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
629 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
630
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000631- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
632 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
633
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000634- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
635 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
636 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
637 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
638 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
639
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000640- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
641 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
642 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
643
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000644- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000645 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
646
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000647- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
648 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
649 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000650
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000651- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
652 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
653
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000654- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
655 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
656 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
657
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000658- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
659
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000660Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000661-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000662
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000663- Added three operators to the operator module:
664 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
665 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
666 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
667
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000668- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
669
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000670- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
671 archives.
672
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000673- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
674 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
675 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
676
677 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
678
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000679- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
680 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
681 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000682 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000683
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000684- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
685 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
686 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
687 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000688 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
689 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
690 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
691 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000692
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000693- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
694 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000695
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000696- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
697
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000698- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
699 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
700
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000701- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
702 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
703 supported.
704
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000705- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
706
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000707- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
708 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000709
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000710- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
711 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
712
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000713- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
714
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000715- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
716 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
717
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000718- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
719 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
720 functions but callable type objects.
721
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000722- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000723 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000724 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000725
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000726- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
727 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000728
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000729- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
730 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000731
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000732- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
733 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
734 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
735 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
736
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000737- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
738 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000739
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000740- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
741 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
742 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
743 and __imul__.
744
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000745- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000746 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
747 is called.
748
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000749- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
750 been added where available.
751
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000752- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
753 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
754 interpreter was compiled.
755
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000756- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
757 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
758 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000759 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000760 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
761 1, not 2.
762
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000763- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
764 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
765 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
766 limit.
767
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000768- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
769 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
770 bug #623464.
771
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +0000772- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
773 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
774 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
775 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
776
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000777Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000778-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000779
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +0000780- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
781
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000782- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
783 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
784 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
785 with Python 2.3a2.
786
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000787- os.path exposes getctime.
788
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000789- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
790 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
791 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
792 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
793 unit tests of floating point results.
794
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000795- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
796 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
797 has been increased.
798
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000799- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
800 executed.
801
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000802- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
803 postinstallation script.
804
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000805- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
806 test the current module.
807
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000808- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
809 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
810 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
811 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
812 this behavior needs to be controlled.
813
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000814- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000815 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000816 Ward's Optik package.
817
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000818- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
819 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
820 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
821 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
822
823- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
824 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000825 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000826
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000827- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
828 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
829 shelf are binary pickles.
830
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000831- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
832 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
833
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000834- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
835 modules are iterators now.
836
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000837- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
838 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
839 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
840 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
841 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
842 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000843
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000844- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
845 with their entity value.
846
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000847- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
848
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000849- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
850 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000851
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000852- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
853 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000854 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000855
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000856- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
857 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
858 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
859 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
860 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
861 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
862 main():
863
864 import locale
865 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
866
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000867- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
868 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
869
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000870- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
871 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
872 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
873 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
874 to the new standard.
875
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000876- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
877 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
878 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
879 an extension to the database.
880
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000881- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
882 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
883 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
884 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000885 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000886
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000887- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000888 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000889
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000890- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
891 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
892 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
893 bounded integers.
894
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +0000895- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
896 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
897 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
898 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
899 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
900 in existence.
901
902 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
903 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
904 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
905 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
906 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
907 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
908
909 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
910 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
911 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
912 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
913
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000914- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
915 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
916 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
917
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000918- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
919
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000920- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
921 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
922 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
923 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
924
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000925- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
926 argument.
927
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000928- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
929 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
930 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
931 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
932 [SF patch 560794].
933
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000934- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
935 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
936 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000937 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
938 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
939 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000940
941- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
942 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000943
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000944- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
945 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
946 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
947 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000948
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000949- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
950 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
951 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
952 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
953 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
954
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000955- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000956
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +0000957- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
958
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000959- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
960 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
961 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
962 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
963 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
964 identical to None.
965
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000966- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
967 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
968 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
969 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
970 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
971 results now.
972
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000973- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
974 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
975
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000976- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
977 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
978 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
979 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
980 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
981 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
982 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
983 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
984
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000985- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
986
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000987- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
988 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
989
990- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
991 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
992 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
993 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
994 and other systems.
995
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000996- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
997 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
998 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
999 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 +00001000 work well with these.
1001
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001002- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1003
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001004- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001005 connections.
1006
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001007- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1008 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1009 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1010
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001011- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1012 sets
1013
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001014- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1015 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1016 name.
1017
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001018- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1019 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1020 passed in.
1021
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001022- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001023 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001024 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1025 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001026
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001027- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1028
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001029- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1030
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001031- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1032 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1033 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1034
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001035- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1036 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1037 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1038 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001039 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001040
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001041- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001042 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001043 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001044
1045- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1046 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1047 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1048
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001049- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001050 the value of its expression argument.
1051
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001052- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1053 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1054 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1055
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001056- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1057 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1058 skipstone browser was included.
1059
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001060- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1061 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1062
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001063Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001064-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001065
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001066- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1067 names in addition to accepting file names.
1068
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001069- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1070 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1071 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1072 still used and useful.)
1073
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001074- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1075 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1076 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1077 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001078
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001079- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1080 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1081 the generated binary.
1082
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001083Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001084-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001085
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001086- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1087
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001088- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1089 except in the hands of experts.
1090
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001091- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001092 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1093 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1094 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001095
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001096- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1097 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1098 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1099 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1100 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1101 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1102 builds.
1103
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001104- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1105 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1106 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1107 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1108 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1109 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1110 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1111 new type.
1112
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001113- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001114
1115 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1116 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1117 positive infinities.
1118
1119 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1120 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1121 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1122 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1123 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1124 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1125 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1126
1127 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1128
1129 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1130
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001131- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1132 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1133 size of the executable.
1134
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001135- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1136 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1137 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1138 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001139
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001140- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1141
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001142- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1143 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1144 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001145
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001146- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1147 well as Unix.
1148
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001149- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1150 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1151 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1152 modules in the README file for details.
1153
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001154C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001155-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001156
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001157- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1158 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001159 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001160 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001161 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001162
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001163- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1164 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1165 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1166 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1167 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1168 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
1169 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
1170 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1171 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1172 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1173 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1174 aligned.)
1175
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001176- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1177 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1178 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1179
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001180- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1181 level.
1182
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001183- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1184 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1185 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1186 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1187 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1188
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001189- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1190 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1191 code.
1192
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001193- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1194 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1195 adjusting for negative indices.
1196
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001197- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1198 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1199 object.
1200
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001201- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1202 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1203 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1204
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001205- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1206 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001207
1208- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1209
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001210- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1211 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1212 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1213 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1214
1215- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1216
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001217- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001218
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001219- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001220 without going through the buffer API.
1221
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001222- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001223
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001224- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1225 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1226 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1227 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1228
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001229- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1230 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1231
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001232- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001233 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1234
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001235New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001236-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001237
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001238- OpenVMS is now supported.
1239
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001240- AtheOS is now supported.
1241
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001242- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1243
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001244- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1245
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001246Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001247-----
1248
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001249- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1250 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1251 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001252
1253Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001254-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001255
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001256- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1257 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1258 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1259 bugs.
1260 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001261 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1262 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1263 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001264 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001265
1266- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001267 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001268
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001269- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1270 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1271
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001272- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1273 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1274 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1275 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1276
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001277- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1278 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1279 use files" uninstall option).
1280
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001281- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1282
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001283- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1284 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1285
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001286- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1287 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1288 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1289
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001290- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1291 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1292 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1293 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1294 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001295 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1296 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1297 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001298
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001299- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001300 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001301 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1302 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1303 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1304 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1305 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1306 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1307 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1308 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1309 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1310 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1311 work around.
1312
1313- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1314 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1315 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1316 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1317 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1318 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1319 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1320 specified with O_CREAT too).
1321
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001322Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001323----
1324
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001325- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001326
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001327- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1328 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1329 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1330
1331- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1332 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1333 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1334 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1335 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1336 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1337 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1338 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001339
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001340- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1341 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1342 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001343
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001344- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1345 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1346 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1347 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1348 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001349
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001350- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1351 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1352 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001353
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001354- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1355 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001356
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001357- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1358 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1359 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1360 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1361 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001362
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001363- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1364 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1365 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1366
1367- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1368 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1369 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001370
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001371- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1372 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1373 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1374 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1375 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001376
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001377- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1378 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001379
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001380- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1381 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001382
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001383- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
1384 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was but "ascii", like on
1385 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1386 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001387
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001388What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001389===============================
1390
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001391*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1392
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001393Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001394--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001395
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001396- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1397 with a custom metaclass.
1398
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001399Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001400-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001401
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001402- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1403 are proxies.
1404
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001405Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001406-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001407
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001408- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1409 very short strings.
1410
1411- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1412 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1413 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1414 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1415 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1416
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001417Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001418-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001419
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001420- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1421 close or delete time).
1422
1423- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1424 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1425
1426- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1427
1428- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001429 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001430
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001431Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001432-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001433
1434Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001435-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001436
1437C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001438-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001439
1440New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001441-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001442
1443Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001444-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001445
1446Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001447-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001448
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001449- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1450
1451- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1452 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1453
1454- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1455 deleted at process exit time.
1456
1457- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1458 in backslash.
1459
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001460Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001461----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001462
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001463- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1464 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1465 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1466
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001467
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001468What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001469===========================
1470
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001471*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1472
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001473Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001474--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001475
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001476- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1477 been extensively updated. See
1478
1479 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1480
1481 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1482
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001483- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1484 deleted!
1485
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001486- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1487 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1488 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1489 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1490 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1491
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001492- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1493
1494 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1495 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1496
1497 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1498 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1499 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1500 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1501 supported anyway.
1502
1503 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1504 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1505
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001506- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1507 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1508 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1509 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1510 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001511
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001512- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1513 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1514 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1515
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001516Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001517-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001518
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001519- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1520 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1521 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1522 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1523 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1524 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001525 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1526 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1527 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1528 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001529
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001530- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1531 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1532 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1533
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001534Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001535-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001536
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001537- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1538
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001539Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001540-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001541
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001542- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1543 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1544 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1545 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1546 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1547 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1548
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001549- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1550
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001551- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1552
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001553- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1554
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001555- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1556 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1557 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1558
1559- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1560
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001561Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001562-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001563
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001564- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1565 off a search on Google.
1566
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001567Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001568-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001569
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001570- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1571 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1572 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1573 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1574 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1575 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1576 other platforms should do likewise.
1577
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001578- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1579 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1580 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1581
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001582C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001583-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001584
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001585- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1586 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1587 producing key-value pairs.
1588
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001589- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001590 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001591 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1592 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1593 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1594 previously went unchallenged.
1595
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001596New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001597-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001598
1599Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001600-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001601
1602Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001603-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001604
1605Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001606----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001607
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001608- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1609 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001610
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001611- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1612 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1613 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1614 home.
1615
1616
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001617What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001618===========================
1619
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001620*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1621
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001622Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001623--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001624
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001625- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1626 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001627
1628 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001629 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001630
1631 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1632 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001633 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001634 This needs to be documented.
1635
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001636- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1637 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1638
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001639- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1640 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1641 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1642
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001643- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1644 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1645
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001646- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1647 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1648 class forbids it).
1649
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001650- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1651 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1652 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1653
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001654- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1655
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001656Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001657-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001658
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001659- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1660 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001661 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001662
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001663- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1664 (like 1 + '').
1665
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001666Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001667-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001668
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001669- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1670 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1671 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1672 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001673 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001674 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1675
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001676- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1677 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1678 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1679 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1680
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001681- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1682 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001683 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1684 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1685 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001686
1687- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1688 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001689
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001690- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1691 bytes on its input.
1692
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001693Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001694-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001695
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001696- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001697 convenience function.
1698
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001699- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1700 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1701 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001702 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1703 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1704 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1705 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1706 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1707 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001708
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001709- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1710 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1711 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1712 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1713
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001714- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1715 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1716 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1717
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001718- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1719 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1720 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1721 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1722
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001723- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1724 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001725 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001726 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1727 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1728 new -l and -e options.
1729
1730- statcache is now deprecated.
1731
1732- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1733 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001734 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001735 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1736 time properly taken into account.
1737
1738- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1739 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1740 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1741 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1742
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001743Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001744-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001745
1746Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001747-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001748
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001749- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1750 is built with libdb3 if available.
1751
1752- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1753
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001754C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001755-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001756
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001757- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1758 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1759 PySequence_Size().
1760
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001761- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1762
1763- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1764 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1765 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1766
1767- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1768 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1769
1770- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1771 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1772
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001773New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001774-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001775
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001776- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1777 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1778
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001779- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1780 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1781
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001782- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1783
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001784Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001785-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001786
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001787- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1788 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1789
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001790Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001791-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001792
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001793Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001794----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001795
1796- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1797 removed completely in the next release.
1798
1799- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1800 OSX.
1801
1802- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1803 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1804
1805- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1806
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001807
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001808What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001809===========================
1810
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001811*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1812
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001813Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001814--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001815
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001816- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001817 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001818 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001819 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1820 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001821 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1822 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001823 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1824 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001825
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001826- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1827 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1828
1829- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1830 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1831
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001832Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001833-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001834
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001835- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1836 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1837 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1838 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1839 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1840 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1841 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1842 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1843
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001844- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1845 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1846 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1847 example).
1848
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001849- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001850 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001851 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001852 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001853
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001854- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1855 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1856 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001857 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001858
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001859- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1860 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1861 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1862 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1863 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1864 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1865
1866 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1867
1868 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1869
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001870Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001871-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001872
1873- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1874
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001875- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1876
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001877- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1878 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001879
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001880- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1881 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1882 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1883 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1884 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1885 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001886 attributes.
1887
1888- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1889 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1890 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001891
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001892- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1893 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1894 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001895
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001896- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1897 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1898 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001899 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1900 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1901
1902- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1903 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001904
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001905Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001906-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001907
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001908- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1909 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1910
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001911- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1912 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1913 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1914 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1915
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001916- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1917 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1918 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1919 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1920
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001921 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1922 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1923 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1924 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1925 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1926 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1927 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1928 without losing information).
1929
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001930- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001931 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1932 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1933 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1934 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1935 module).
1936
1937 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1938 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1939 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1940 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1941 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001942
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001943- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001944 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1945 encoding.
1946
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001947- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1948 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1949
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001950- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001951 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1952
1953- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1954 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1955 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1956 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1957
1958- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1959
1960- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1961 ON, and OFF.
1962
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001963- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1964 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1965
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001966Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001967-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001968
1969- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1970 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1971 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001972
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001973- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1974 been added: -X and -E.
1975
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001976Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001977-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001978
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001979- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1980 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1981
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001982C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001983-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001984
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001985- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1986 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1987 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1988 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1989 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1990
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001991- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1992 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1993 as long) arguments.
1994
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001995- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1996 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1997 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1998 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1999 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2000 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2001
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002002- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2003 input.
2004
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002005New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002006-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002007
2008Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002009-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002010
2011Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002012-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002013
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002014- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2015 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2016 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2017
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002018- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2019 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2020 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002021 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002022
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002023 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2024 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2025 import signal
2026 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002027
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002028 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002029 while 1:
2030 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002031 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002032 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2033 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2034 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2035 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002036
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002037
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002038What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2039===========================
2040
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002041*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2042
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002043Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002044--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002045
2046- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2047 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2048 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2049
2050- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2051 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2052 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2053 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2054 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2055 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2056 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002057
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002058- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002059 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002060 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2061 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2062 associate a docstring with a property.
2063
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002064- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2065 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2066 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2067 other built-in object types.
2068
2069- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2070 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2071 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2072 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2073 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2074
2075- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2076 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2077
2078- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2079 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002080 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002081 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2082 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2083 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2084 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2085 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2086
2087- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2088 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2089 class.
2090
2091- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2092 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2093 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2094 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2095
2096- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2097 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2098 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2099 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2100
2101- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2102 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2103
2104- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2105 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2106 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2107 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2108 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002109 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002110 with the same value as s.
2111
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002112- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2113
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002114Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002115----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002116
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002117- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2118
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002119- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2120 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2121 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2122 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2123 objects.
2124
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002125- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2126 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002127 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2128 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2129
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002130- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2131 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2132 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2133
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002134Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002135-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002136
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002137- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2138 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2139 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2140 by the instances.
2141
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002142- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2143 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2144 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2145
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002146- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2147 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2148 before the entire comparison is complete.
2149
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002150- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2151 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2152 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2153
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002154- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2155 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2156 getwriter().
2157
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002158- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2159 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2160
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002161- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002162 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2163 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2164
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002165- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2166 iterable object.
2167
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002168- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2169 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002170
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002171- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2172 authentication.
2173
2174- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2175 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002176
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002177- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002178 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2179 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2180 a sample driver.)
2181
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002182Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002183-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002184
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002185- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2186 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2187 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2188 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2189 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2190 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2191 kernel has large file support.
2192
2193- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2194 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2195 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2196 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2197 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2198
2199- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2200 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2201 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2202
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002203C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002204-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002205
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002206- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2207 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2208
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002209New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002210-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002211
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002212- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2213 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2214
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002215Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002216-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002217
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002218- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2219 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2220 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2221 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2222 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2223
2224- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2225 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2226 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2227 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2228
2229- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2230 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2231
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002232Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002233-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002234
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002235- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002236 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2237 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002238
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002239
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002240What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2241===========================
2242
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002243*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2244
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002245Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002246----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002247
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002248- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2249 big to represent as a C double.
2250
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002251- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2252 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2253 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2254 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2255 restriction).
2256
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002257- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2258 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2259 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2260 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2261 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2262
2263 >>> dir([])
2264 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2265 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2266 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2267 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2268 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2269 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2270 'reverse', 'sort']
2271
2272 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2273
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002274- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002275 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2276 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2277 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2278 OverflowError exception.
2279
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002280- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002281 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002282 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2283 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2284 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2285 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2286 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002287 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002288 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2289 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2290
2291 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2292 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2293 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2294 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002295
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002296- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002297 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2298 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2299 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2300 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2301 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2302 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2303 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2304 once it is created.
2305
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002306- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2307 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2308 (key, value) pairs.
2309
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002310- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002311 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2312 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2313
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002314- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2315 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2316 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2317 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2318 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002319
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002320- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002321 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2322 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2323
2324 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2325
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002326- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002327 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2328
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002329Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002330-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002331
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002332- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002333 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2334 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002335
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002336- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2337 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2338 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2339 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2340 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2341 in this area anymore).
2342
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002343- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2344 threading.Timer.
2345
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002346- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2347 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2348
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002349- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002350 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2351
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002352- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002353 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2354 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2355 converted to Python longs.
2356
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002357- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002358 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2359
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002360- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2361 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2362 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2363
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002364Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002365-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002366
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002367- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2368 division operators as per PEP 238.
2369
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002370Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002371-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002372
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002373- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2374 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2375 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2376 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2377
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002378C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002379-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002380
2381- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002382
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002383- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2384 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002385 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002386
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002387 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2388 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002389 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002390 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002391
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002392- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002393 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2394 module:
2395
2396 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002397
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002398 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2399 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002400
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002401 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2402 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002403
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002404 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2405
2406 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2407
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002408- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002409 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2410 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2411 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002412
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002413New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002414-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002415
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002416- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2417 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2418 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2419 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2420 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002421
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002422Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002423-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002424
2425Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002426-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002427
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002428- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2429 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2430 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2431 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002432 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2433 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2434 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2435 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2436 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002437
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002438- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002439 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2440
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002441
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002442What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2443===========================
2444
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002445*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2446
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002447Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002448-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002449
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002450- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2451 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2452
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002453- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2454 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2455 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002456
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002457- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2458 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2459 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2460 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002461
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002462- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2463
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002464- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002465
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002466Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002467-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002468
2469- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002470 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002471 the module docstring for details.
2472
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002473Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002474-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002475
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002476- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002477 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2478 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2479 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002480
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002481- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2482 Nick Mathewson.
2483
2484Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002485----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002486
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002487- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2488 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2489 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2490 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2491 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2492 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2493 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2494 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2495
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002496- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2497 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2498 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2499 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2500
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002501- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2502 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2503 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2504 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2505 come a long way).
2506
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002507- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2508 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2509 write filters for these warnings).
2510
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002511- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2512 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2513 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2514 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2515 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2516
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002517- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2518 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2519 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2520 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2521 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2522 older distribution.
2523
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002524Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002525-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002526
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002527- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2528 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002529 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002530
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002531- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2532 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2533 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2534
2535- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2536
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002537- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2538
2539- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2540
2541- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2542
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002543- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002544
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002545- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2546
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002547New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002548-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002549
2550C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002551-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002552
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002553- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2554 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2555 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2556 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2557 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2558 against buffer overruns.
2559
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002560- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002561 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2562 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002563 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2564 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2565 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2566
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002567- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2568 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2569 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2570 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2571 deprecated.
2572
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002573Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002574-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002575
2576- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2577 relevant is found.
2578
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002579
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002580What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002581===========================
2582
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002583*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2584
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002585Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002586----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002587
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002588- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2589 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2590 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2591 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2592 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2593 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2594 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2595 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002596 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002597 repaired.
2598
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002599- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002600 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002601 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2602 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2603 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2604 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2605 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2606 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2607 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2608 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2609
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002610- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2611 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2612 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2613 leading BMO character).
2614
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002615- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2616 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2617 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2618
2619 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2620 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2621 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002622
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002623 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2624 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2625 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2626 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2627 for various simple to use conversions.
2628
2629 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2630 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2631
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002632 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2633 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2634 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2635 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2636 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2637 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2638 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2639 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2640 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2641 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2642 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2643 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2644 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2645 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2646 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002647
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002648- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2649 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2650 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002651 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002652 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002653
2654 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002655 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2656 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2657 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2658 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2659 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002660 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2661 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002662
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002663 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2664 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2665 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002666 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002667
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002668- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2669 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2670 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2671 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2672 floating arithmetic,
2673
2674 x = 9007199254740992.0
2675 print long(x)
2676
2677 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2678 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2679 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2680 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2681 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2682 functions are of good quality).
2683
2684 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2685 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2686 algorithms to break.
2687
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002688- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2689 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2690 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2691 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2692 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2693 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2694 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2695 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2696 order.
2697
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002698- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2699 operation along the most common code paths.
2700
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002701- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2702 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2703
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002704- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2705 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2706 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2707 {}.update(UserDict())
2708
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002709- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2710 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2711 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2712 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2713 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2714 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2715 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2716 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2717
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002718- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002719 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002720
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002721 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002722 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2723 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002724 join() method of strings
2725 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002726 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2727 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002728 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002729 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002730
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002731- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2732 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2733
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002734- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2735 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2736
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002737- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2738 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2739 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2740 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2741
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002742- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2743 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002744 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002745 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2746 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002747
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002748- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2749
2750
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002751Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002752-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002753
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002754- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002755 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002756 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2757 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2758
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002759- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2760 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2761
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002762- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2763 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2764 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2765 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2766
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002767- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2768 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2769 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2770
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002771- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2772
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002773- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2774
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002775- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2776 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2777 that are still imported into string.py).
2778
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002779- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2780
2781- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2782 Now it does.
2783
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002784- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2785
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002786- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2787 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2788 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2789 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2790 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002791 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2792 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002793
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002794- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2795 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2796 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2797 'help(object)'.
2798
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002799Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002800-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002801
2802- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002803 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002804 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2805 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2806
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002807- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002808 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2809 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002810
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002811C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002812-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002813
2814- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2815 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002816
2817----
2818
2819**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**