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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000015- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000016 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000017
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000018- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000019 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000020 which was missing for no apparent reason.
21
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000022- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000023 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
24 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
25
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000026- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
27 types that support garbage collection.
28
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000029- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
30
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000031Extension modules
32-----------------
33
34Library
35-------
36
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +000037- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
38 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
39 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
40 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
41 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
42 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
43 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
44 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
45 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
46 by some other method in progress).
47
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000048- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
49 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
50 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +000051
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +000052- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
53
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +000054- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
55 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
56 AM Kuchling.
57
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000058- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
59 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
60 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
61
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +000062- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
63 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
64 instead of unsigned.
65
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000066- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +000067 no longer part of the public API.
68
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +000069- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
70 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
71 string methods of the same name).
72
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +000073- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
74 SF patch 982681.
75
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000076- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +000077 SF patch 945642.
78
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000079- doctest unittest integration improvements:
80
81 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
82
83 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
84 DocTestSuites.
85
86- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
87 that provide thread-local data.
88
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000089Tools/Demos
90-----------
91
92Build
93-----
94
95C API
96-----
97
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000098- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
99 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
100
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000101Documentation
102-------------
103
104Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
105
106 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
107 assigning thier values
108
109 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
110
111 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
112
113
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000114New platforms
115-------------
116
117Tests
118-----
119
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000120- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
121 platforms that use the Makefile.
122
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000123Windows
124-------
125
126Mac
127---
128
129
130
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000131What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
132=================================
133
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000134*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000135
136Core and builtins
137-----------------
138
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000139- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
140 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
141 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
142 objects now (one object instead of three).
143
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000144- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
145 Windows DLLs.
146
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000147- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
148
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000149- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
150 a new .pyc magic.
151
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000152- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
153 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
154 be there.
155
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000156- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
157 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
158 the LC_NUMERIC category.
159
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000160- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
161 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
162 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
163
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000164- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
165
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000166- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
167 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
168 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000169
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000170- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
171 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
172
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000173- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
174
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000175- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000176 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000177
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000178- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
179
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000180- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
181
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000182- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
183 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
184
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000185- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
186 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
187 Fixes bug #858016 .
188
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000189- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
190 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
191 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
192
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000193- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
194 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
195 improves their performance (about 35%).
196
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000197- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
198 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
199 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
200
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000201- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
202 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
203 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
204 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
205
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000206- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
207 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
208 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
209 length is not known).
210
211- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
212 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000213 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
214 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000215 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
216
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000217- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
218 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
219
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000220- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
221 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
222 keyword arguments.
223
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000224- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
225 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
226 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
227
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000228- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
229 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
230 cases.
231
232- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
233 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
234 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
235 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
236 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
237 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
238 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
239 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
240 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
241 a release build.
242
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000243- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
244 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
245
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000246- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000247 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000248
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000249- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
250 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
251 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
252 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
253 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
254 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
255 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
256 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
257 destroyed.
258
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000259- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
260 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
261 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
262 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
263 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
264 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
265 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
266 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
267
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000268- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
269 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
270 character other than a space.
271
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000272- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
273 by the function object or by the method object, the function
274 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
275 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
276 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
277 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
278 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
279 attributes with the same name.
280
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000281- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
282 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
283 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
284 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
285 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
286 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
287 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
288 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
289 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
290 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
291 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
292 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
293 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
294 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000295
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000296- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
297 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
298 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
299 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
300 This has been repaired.
301
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000302- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
303
304- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
305
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000306- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
307 over a sequence.
308
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000309- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000310 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000311
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000312- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
313
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000314- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
315 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
316 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
317 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
318 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
319 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
320 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
321 records with equal keys is unchanged).
322
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000323- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
324 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
325 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
326
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000327- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
328 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
329 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
330 freelist.
331
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000332- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
333 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
334
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000335- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
336 number.
337
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000338- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
339 a TypeError exception.
340
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000341- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
342 820195.
343
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000344- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
345 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
346 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
347
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000348- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000349 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
350 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000351
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000352- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
353 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
354 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
355
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000356- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
357 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000358 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000359
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000360- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000361 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
362 the first call.
363
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000364
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000365Extension modules
366-----------------
367
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000368- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
369 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
370
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000371- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
372 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
373 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
374 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
375 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
376 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
377 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000378
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000379- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
380
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000381- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
382
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000383- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
384 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
385
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000386- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
387 fewer false positives.
388
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000389- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
390 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
391
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000392- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000393 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
394
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000395- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000396 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000397 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
398 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
399 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000400
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000401- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
402 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
403 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
404 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
405
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000406- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
407 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
408 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
409 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
410 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
411 #897625.
412
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000413- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
414 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
415
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000416- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
417 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
418 and pops on either side of the deque.
419
420- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
421 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
422
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000423- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
424 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
425 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
426 other functions that expect a function argument.
427
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000428- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
429
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000430- os.getsid was added.
431
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000432- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
433 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
434 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
435
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000436- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
437
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000438- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
439
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000440- readline.clear_history was added.
441
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000442- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
443
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000444- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
445
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000446- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
447
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000448- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
449
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000450- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
451
452- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
453
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000454- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
455
456- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
457
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000458- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
459 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
460 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
461
462- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
463 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
464 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
465 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
466 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
467 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
468 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
469
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000470- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
471 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
472 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
473 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000474
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000475- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000476 iterators from a single iterable.
477
478- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
479 of raising a TypeError exception.
480
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000481- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
482 as parameter.
483
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000484Library
485-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000486
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000487- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
488 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
489 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000490
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000491- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
492 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
493 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000494
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000495- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000496
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000497- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
498 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000499
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000500- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
501 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
502
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000503- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
504
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000505- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000506 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000507
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000508- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
509 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
510
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000511- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
512
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000513- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
514 on cygwin and mingw32.
515
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000516- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
517
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000518- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
519 module.
520
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000521- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
522 installation scheme for all platforms.
523
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000524- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000525 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000526
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000527- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
528 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
529 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
530
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000531- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
532 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
533 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
534
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000535- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
536
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000537- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
538
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000539- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
540 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
541
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000542- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
543 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
544 type pattern with the same value exists.
545
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000546- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
547 when run from the command prompt).
548
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000549- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
550 not taken into consideration when caching value.
551
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000552- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
553 default sort).
554
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000555- Added global runctx function to profile module
556
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000557- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
558
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000559- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
560
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000561- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
562
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000563- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000564 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
565 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
566 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
567 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
568 accordingly.
569
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000570- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
571 decoding standards.
572
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000573- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
574 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
575 called for all requests.
576
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000577- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
578 they are passed to the compiler.
579
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000580- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
581 indent, width and depth.
582
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000583- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
584 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
585
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000586- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
587 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
588
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000589- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
590
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000591- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
592
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000593- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
594
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000595- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
596 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
597
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000598- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000599 for better performance.
600
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000601- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000602
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000603- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
604 a string).
605
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000606- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
607
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000608- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
609
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000610- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
611
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000612- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
613
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000614- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
615 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
616 list of fieldnames.
617
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000618- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
619 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
620
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000621- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
622
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000623- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
624 empty lists.
625
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000626- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
627 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
628 and shelves.
629
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000630- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
631 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
632
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000633- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000634 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
635 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000636
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000637- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
638 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000639 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000640
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000641- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000642 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
643 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
644
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000645- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
646 and removed in Py2.4.
647
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000648- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
649
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000650- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
651
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000652Tools/Demos
653-----------
654
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000655- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
656 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
657
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000658- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
659
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000660- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
661 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
662 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
663 destination in situations where both files are given.
664
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000665- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
666 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
667 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
668 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
669
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000670- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
671
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000672- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
673 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
674 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
675 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
676 now.
677
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000678- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
679 in effect
680
681- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
682 C-c C-h
683
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000684- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
685 -d option was given.
686
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000687Build
688-----
689
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000690- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
691 build under OS X.
692
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000693- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
694 --enable-profiling.
695
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000696- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
697 is configured --with-tsc.
698
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000699- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
700 on AMD64.
701
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000702- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
703 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
704
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000705- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
706 removed.
707
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000708- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
709 supported (see PEP 11).
710
711- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
712
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000713- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
714
715- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
716 (see PEP 11).
717
718- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
719 sizeof(char) must be 1.
720
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000721C API
722-----
723
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000724- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
725 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
726 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
727
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000728- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
729 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
730 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
731 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
732
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000733- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
734 generator objects.
735
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000736- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
737 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000738 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
739 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000740
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000741- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
742 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
743
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000744- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
745 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
746 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
747 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
748 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
749
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000750- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
751 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
752 about 10% faster.
753
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000754- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
755 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
756
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000757- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
758 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
759 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
760 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
761
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000762Windows
763-------
764
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000765- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
766 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
767 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
768 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
769
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000770- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
771 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
772 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
773
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000774
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000775What's New in Python 2.3 final?
776===============================
777
778*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
779
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000780IDLE
781----
782
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000783- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
784 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
785 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
786 context-menu actions.
787
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000788- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
789 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
790 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
791 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
792 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
793 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
794 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
795 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
796 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
797
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000798
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000799What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
800=============================================
801
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000802*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000803
804Core and builtins
805-----------------
806
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000807- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000808 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000809 comment at the end are still unsupported.
810
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000811Extension modules
812-----------------
813
814- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
815 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
816 than once. This has been fixed.
817
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000818- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
819 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
820 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
821 call.
822
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000823- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
824
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000825Library
826-------
827
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000828- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
829 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
830
831- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
832 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
833 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
834 restored.
835
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000836IDLE
837----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000838
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000839- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000840
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000841Build
842-----
843
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000844- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
845 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
846
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000847C API
848-----
849
850Windows
851-------
852
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000853- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
854 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
855
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000856- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
857
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000858Mac
859---
860
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000861- Various fixes to pimp.
862
863- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
864
865- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
866 more problems than it solves.
867
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000868
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000869What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
870=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000871
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000872*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
873
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000874Core and builtins
875-----------------
876
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000877- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
878 by sys.setcheckinterval().
879
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000880- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
881 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000882 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000883
884- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
885 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
886 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000887 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000888
889- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
890 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000891
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000892- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
893 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
894 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
895
896- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000897 770247.
898
899- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000900
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000901Extension modules
902-----------------
903
904- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
905 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
906
907- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
908
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000909- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
910
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000911- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
912 contained within the _strptime module.
913
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000914- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
915 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
916
917- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000918 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
919
920- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
921 the find_class attribute, if present.
922
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000923- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000924
925 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
926 (SF bug 763298).
927
928 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000929 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
930 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
931 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000932
933 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
934
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000935Library
936-------
937
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000938- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
939
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000940- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
941 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
942 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
943 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
944 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
945 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
946 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
947 or Tester().
948
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000949- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
950 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
951 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
952 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
953 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
954 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
955 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
956 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
957 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000958
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000959 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000960
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000961- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
962 weren't before was an oversight.
963
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000964- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
965 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
966
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000967- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
968 when there are no lines.
969
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000970- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
971 which could occur with Tk 8.4
972
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000973- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
974 to child processes.
975
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000976- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
977
978- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
979
980- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
981 xmlrpclib.
982
983- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
984 responses.
985
986- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
987 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
988
989- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
990 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
991 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
992
993- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
994 used as patterns.
995
996- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
997 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
998 than Tk 8.3.
999
1000- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1001
1002- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001003
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001004Tools/Demos
1005-----------
1006
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001007- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1008
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001009- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1010
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001011- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001012
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001013Build
1014-----
1015
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001016- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1017
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001018- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1019
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001020- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1021 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001022
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001023- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1024 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1025 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001026
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001027C API
1028-----
1029
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001030- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1031 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1032
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001033Windows
1034-------
1035
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001036- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1037 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1038 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1039 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1040 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1041 Python exception ::
1042
1043 thread.error: can't start new thread
1044
1045 is raised now.
1046
1047- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1048 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1049 instead of from DLL teardown.
1050
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001051Mac
1052---
1053
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001054- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001055 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001056 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1057 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1058 the executable in the bundle.
1059
1060- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001061
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001062- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1063
1064- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1065 on Panther.
1066
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001067What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1068================================
1069
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001070*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001071
1072Core and builtins
1073-----------------
1074
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001075- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1076 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1077 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1078 with the -i option.
1079
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001080- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1081 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1082
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001083- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1084 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1085
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001086- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1087 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1088 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1089 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1090 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1091 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1092 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1093 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1094 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1095 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1096 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1097 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1098 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001099
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001100- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1101 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1102 embedded in a lambda expression.
1103
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001104- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1105 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1106 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1107 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1108 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1109
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001110- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1111 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1112 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1113
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001114- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1115 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1116
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001117- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1118 It's writable again.
1119
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001120- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1121 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1122 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001123 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001124
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001125- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1126 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1127 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1128
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001129Extension modules
1130-----------------
1131
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001132- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1133 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1134
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001135- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1136 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1137 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1138 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1139
1140- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1141 collection.
1142
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001143- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1144 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1145 unique within a single program run.
1146
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001147- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1148 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1149
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001150- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1151 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1152
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001153- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1154 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001155
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001156- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1157
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001158- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1159 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1160
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001161- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1162 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1163 for many BSD-derived systems.
1164
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001165
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001166Library
1167-------
1168
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001169- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1170 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1171 primary ones:
1172
1173 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1174 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1175 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1176
1177 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1178 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1179 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1180 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1181 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1182 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1183
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001184- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1185 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1186 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1187 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1188 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1189 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1190 argument.
1191
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001192- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1193 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1194 in the archive.
1195
1196- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1197 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1198
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001199- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1200 569574).
1201
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001202- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1203 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1204 no more.
1205
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001206- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1207 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1208 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1209 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1210 code coverage.
1211
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001212- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1213 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1214 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001215 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1216 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001217
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001218- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1219 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1220 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001221 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001222
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001223- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1224
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001225- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1226 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1227 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1228 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1229
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001230- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1231 handling.
1232
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001233- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1234 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1235
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001236- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1237 in socket.py.
1238
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001239- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1240
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001241- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1242 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1243 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1244 opener with proxy support.
1245
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001246- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1247
1248- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1249
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001250Tools/Demos
1251-----------
1252
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001253- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1254
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001255- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1256
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001257- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1258 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001259
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001260- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1261 files.
1262
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001263Build
1264-----
1265
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001266- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001267 different root directory.
1268
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001269C API
1270-----
1271
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001272- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1273 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1274 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1275 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1276 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1277 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1278 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1279 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1280 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1281 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1282
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001283- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1284 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1285 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1286 from Python.
1287
1288
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001289New platforms
1290-------------
1291
1292None this time.
1293
1294Tests
1295-----
1296
1297- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1298 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1299
1300Windows
1301-------
1302
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001303- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1304
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001305- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1306 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1307 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1308 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1309 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1310 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1311 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1312 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1313 that's what it's for.
1314
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001315Mac
1316---
1317
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001318- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1319 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1320 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1321 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001322- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1323 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1324- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001325
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001326SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1327------------------------------------
1328
1329430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1330598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1331622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1332661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1333683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1334697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1335713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1336724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1337727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1338729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1339730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1340731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1341732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1342733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1343735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1344740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1345744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1346745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1347747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1348749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1349751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1350753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1351755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1352757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1353760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1354
1355
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001356What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1357================================
1358
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001359*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001360
1361Core and builtins
1362-----------------
1363
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001364- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1365 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1366
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001367- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1368 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1369 and cannot be strings).
1370
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001371- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1372 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1373 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1374 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1375
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001376- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1377 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1378 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1379 Python itself.
1380
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001381- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1382 the referenced object, if it has one.
1383
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001384- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1385 the thread started at
1386 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1387
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001388- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1389 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1390 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1391 placed on a list index.
1392
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001393- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1394 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1395 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1396 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1397
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001398- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1399 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1400 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1401 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1402 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1403 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1404 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1405
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001406- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1407 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1408 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1409 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1410 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1411
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001412- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1413 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001414
1415- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1416 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1417 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1418 #693195.)
1419
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001420- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1421 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001422
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001423- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001424 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001425 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1426 interpreter executions, would fail.
1427
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001428- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001429 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001430 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001431
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001432Extension modules
1433-----------------
1434
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001435- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1436 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1437 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1438 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1439
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001440- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1441 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1442
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001443- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1444 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1445 and Greg Chapman.)
1446
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001447- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1448 recursively.
1449
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001450- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001451 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1452 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1453 leaks.
1454
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001455- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1456
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001457- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1458 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1459 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1460 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1461 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1462 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1463 #705836.
1464
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001465- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001466 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1467
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001468- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1469 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1470 See SF bug #692416.
1471
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001472- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1473 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1474
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001475- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1476 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1477 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001478
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001479- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001480 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1481 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1482
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001483- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1484 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1485 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1486 timeouts to work properly.
1487
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001488Library
1489-------
1490
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001491- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1492 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1493 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1494 future release.
1495
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001496- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1497 for querying platform dependent features.
1498
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001499- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001500
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001501- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1502 pickle protocol versions.
1503
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001504- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1505 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1506 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1507
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001508- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1509
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001510- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1511 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1512 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1513 modules.
1514
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001515- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1516 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1517 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1518
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001519- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1520 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1521
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001522- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1523 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1524 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1525
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001526- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001527 MS Office extensions.
1528
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001529- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1530 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1531
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001532- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1533 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1534
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001535- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1536 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1537 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1538 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1539 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1540 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1541
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001542- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1543 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1544 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001545
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001546- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1547 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1548 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1549
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001550- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1551
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001552- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1553 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1554 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1555
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001556Tools/Demos
1557-----------
1558
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001559- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1560 See the module docstring for details.
1561
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001562Build
1563-----
1564
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001565- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1566 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001567
1568C API
1569-----
1570
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001571- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1572
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001573- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1574 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1575 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1576
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001577- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1578 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001579
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001580 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1581 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1582 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001583
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001584- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001585 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1586
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001587- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1588 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1589 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001590
1591New platforms
1592-------------
1593
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001594None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001595
1596Tests
1597-----
1598
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001599- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1600 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001601
1602Windows
1603-------
1604
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001605- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1606 function.
1607
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001608- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1609 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001610
1611Mac
1612---
1613
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001614- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1615 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001616
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001617- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1618 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001619
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001620- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1621 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1622 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001623
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001624- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001625 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1626 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001627
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001628- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1629 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001630
1631
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001632What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1633=================================
1634
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001635*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001636
1637Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001638-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001639
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001640- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1641 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1642 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1643
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001644- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1645 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1646 (SF patch #664376.)
1647
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001648- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1649 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1650 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1651 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1652 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1653 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001654 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001655
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001656- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1657 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1658 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1659 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001660 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001661
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001662- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1663 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1664 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1665 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1666 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1667 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1668 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1669 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1670 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1671 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1672 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1673
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001674- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1675 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1676 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1677 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1678 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1679 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1680
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001681- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1682 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1683
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001684- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1685 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1686 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1687 case.)
1688
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001689- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1690 passed as unicode strings.
1691
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001692- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1693 See SF bug #683467.
1694
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001695- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1696 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1697
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001698- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1699
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001700- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1701
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001702- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1703 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1704 arguments.
1705
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001706- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1707 See SF bug #667147.
1708
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001709- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001710 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001711 See SF bug #676155.
1712
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001713- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001714 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001715 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1716 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1717 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1718 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1719 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1720 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001721
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001722Extension modules
1723-----------------
1724
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001725- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1726 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1727 tp_as_number pointer.
1728
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001729- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1730 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1731 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1732 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1733 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1734
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001735- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1736
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001737- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1738
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001739- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001740 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001741 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1742 patch #678531.)
1743
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001744- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1745 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1746
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001747- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1748 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1749
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001750- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1751
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001752- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1753 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1754 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1755
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001756- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1757
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001758- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1759 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1760
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001761- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001762
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001763- datetime changes:
1764
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001765 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1766
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001767 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1768 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1769 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1770 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1771 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1772 now.
1773
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001774 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001775 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1776 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001777
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001778 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001779 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001780 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1781 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1782 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1783 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001784
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001785 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1786 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1787 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001788 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1789
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001790 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1791 by a later example coded by Guido.
1792
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001793 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001794 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1795 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1796 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001797 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1798 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1799
1800 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1801 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1802 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1803 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1804 tzinfo subclass instance.
1805
1806 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1807 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1808 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1809 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1810 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1811 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1812 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1813 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001814
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001815 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1816 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1817 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1818 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1819 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001820 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1821
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001822 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001823
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001824 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1825 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1826 as a naive datetime object.
1827
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001828 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1829 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1830 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1831
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001832 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1833 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1834 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1835 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1836 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1837 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1838 comparison.
1839
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001840 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1841 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1842 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1843 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001844 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001845
1846 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001847
1848 and ::
1849
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001850 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1851
1852 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1853 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1854 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1855 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1856
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001857 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1858 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1859 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1860 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1861 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1862
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001863 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1864 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001865 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1866 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001867
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001868Library
1869-------
1870
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001871- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1872 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1873
1874- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1875 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1876 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1877 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1878 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1879 See PEP 307 for details.
1880
1881- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1882 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1883
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001884- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1885 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001886 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001887 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1888 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001889 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001890
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001891- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1892 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1893
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001894- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1895 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1896 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1897
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001898- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1899
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001900- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1901 exception.
1902
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001903- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1904 class.
1905
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001906- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1907 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1908 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1909
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001910- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1911 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1912
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001913- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001914 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1915 See SF bug #659228.
1916
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001917- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1918 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1919 See SF patch #651082.
1920
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001921- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001922
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001923- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1924 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1925
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001926- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001927 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001928
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001929- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1930 DOS paths from other platforms.
1931
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001932Tools/Demos
1933-----------
1934
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001935- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1936 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1937 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1938 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1939 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1940 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1941 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1942 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1943 example:
1944
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001945 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1946 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001947
1948 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1949
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001950
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001951Build
1952-----
1953
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001954- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1955 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1956 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001957 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1958
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001959 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1960
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001961- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1962 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1963 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1964 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1965 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1966 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1967 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1968 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1969 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1970
1971- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1972 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1973 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1974 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1975
1976- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1977 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1978
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001979C API
1980-----
1981
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001982- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1983 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001984
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001985- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1986 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1987 tp_as_number pointer.
1988
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001989- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1990 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1991 (SF #681367)
1992
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001993- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1994 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1995 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1996 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001997
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001998Tests
1999-----
2000
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002001- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002002 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2003 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2004 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2005 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2006 pydoc.)
2007
2008- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2009
2010- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002011
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002012Windows
2013-------
2014
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002015- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2016 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2017 time).
2018
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002019- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2020 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2021
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002022- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2023 release without strong cryptography.
2024
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002025- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002026 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002027
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002028- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2029 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2030
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002031Mac
2032---
2033
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002034- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2035 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002036
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002037- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2038 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2039 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002040
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002041- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2042 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002043
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002044- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2045 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2046 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2047 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002048
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002049- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002050 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2051 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2052 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002053
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002054
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002055What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002056=================================
2057
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002058*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002059
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002060Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002061--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002062
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002063- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2064
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002065- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2066 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002067 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002068 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002069 a different meaning than before.
2070
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002071- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002072 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002073 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002074
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002075- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002076 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002077 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002078
2079- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2080 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2081 and deallocation.
2082
2083- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2084 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2085
2086- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2087 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2088 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2089 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2090 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2091
2092- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2093 now detected by the garbage collector.
2094
2095- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2096 [SF bug 519621]
2097
2098- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2099 identifier.
2100
2101- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2102 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2103 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2104 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2105 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2106 [SF bug 563060]
2107
2108- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2109 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2110 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2111 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2112 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2113
2114- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2115 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2116 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2117
2118- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2119
2120- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2121 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2122 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2123 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2124 state of the slots would be lost.)
2125
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002126Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002127-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002128
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002129- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002130 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2131 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2132 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2133 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002134 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2135 Jython 2.1.
2136
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002137- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002138 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002139 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2140 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2141 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2142 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2143 these, see PEP 302.
2144
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002145- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2146 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2147 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2148
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002149- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2150 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2151 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2152
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002153- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2154 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2155 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2156
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002157- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2158 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2159 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2160 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2161 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2162 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2163 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2164 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2165 releases or implementations.
2166
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002167- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002168 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2169 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002170
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002171- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2172 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2173
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002174- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2175 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2176 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2177
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002178- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2179 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2180
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002181- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2182 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002183 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2184 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002185
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002186- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2187 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2188 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2189 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2190 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2191
2192 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2193 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2194 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2195 pattern.
2196
2197 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2198 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2199 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2200 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2201
2202 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2203 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2204 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2205 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2206 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2207 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2208
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002209- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2210 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2211 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2212 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2213 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2214 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2215 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2216 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002217
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002218- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2219 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2220 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2221 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2222 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002223 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2224 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2225 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2226 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2227 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2228 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2229 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002230
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002231- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2232 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2233
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002234- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2235 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2236 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2237 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2238 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2239 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2240 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2241 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2242 to Zack Weinberg!
2243
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002244- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2245 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2246 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2247 type. This has been fixed now.
2248
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002249- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2250 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2251 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2252
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002253- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2254 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2255 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2256 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2257 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2258 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2259 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2260 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002261 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002262
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002263- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2264 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2265 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002266
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002267- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2268 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2269 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2270 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2271 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2272 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2273 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2274 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002275 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002276 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2277 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2278
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002279- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2280 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2281 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2282 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2283 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2284 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2285 this.)
2286
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002287- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2288 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002289 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002290 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002291 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2292 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002293 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2294 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002295
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002296- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2297 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2298 currently running.
2299
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002300- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2301 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2302 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2303 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2304
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002305- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2306 as directory names.
2307
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002308- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2309 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2310
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002311- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2312 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2313
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002314- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002315 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2316 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002317
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002318- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2319 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2320 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2321 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2322 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2323
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002324- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2325 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2326 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2327 removed.
2328
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002329- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2330 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2331 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2332
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002333- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2334 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2335 to __debug__.
2336
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002337- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2338 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2339 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2340
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002341- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2342 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2343 deprecated now.
2344
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002345- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2346 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2347 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002348
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002349- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2350 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2351 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2352 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2353 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002354
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002355- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2356 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2357
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002358- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2359 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2360 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002361 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002362 is backward compatible.
2363
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002364- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2365 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2366 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2367 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2368 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2369
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002370- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2371 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2372 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2373 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2374 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2375 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002376
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002377- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2378 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2379
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002380- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2381 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2382
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002383- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2384 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2385 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2386 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2387 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2388
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002389- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2390 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2391 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2392
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002393- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002394 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2395
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002396- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2397 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2398 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002399
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002400- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2401 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2402
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002403- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2404 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2405 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2406
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002407- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2408
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002409Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002410-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002411
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002412- Added three operators to the operator module:
2413 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2414 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2415 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2416
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002417- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2418
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002419- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2420 archives.
2421
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002422- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2423 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2424 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2425
2426 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2427
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002428- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2429 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2430 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002431 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002432
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002433- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2434 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2435 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2436 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002437 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2438 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2439 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2440 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002441
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002442- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2443 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002444
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002445- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2446
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002447- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2448 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2449
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002450- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2451 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2452 supported.
2453
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002454- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2455
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002456- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2457 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002458
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002459- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2460 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2461
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002462- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2463
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002464- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2465 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2466
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002467- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2468 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2469 functions but callable type objects.
2470
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002471- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002472 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002473 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002474
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002475- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2476 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002477
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002478- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2479 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002480
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002481- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2482 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2483 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2484 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2485
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002486- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2487 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002488
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002489- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2490 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2491 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2492 and __imul__.
2493
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002494- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002495 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2496 is called.
2497
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002498- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2499 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2500 interpreter was compiled.
2501
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002502- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2503 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2504 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002505 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002506 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2507 1, not 2.
2508
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002509- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2510 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2511 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2512 limit.
2513
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002514- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2515 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2516 bug #623464.
2517
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002518- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2519 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2520 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2521 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2522
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002523Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002524-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002525
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002526- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2527
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002528- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2529 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2530 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2531 with Python 2.3a2.
2532
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002533- os.path exposes getctime.
2534
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002535- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002536 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002537 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002538 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002539 unit tests of floating point results.
2540
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002541- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2542 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2543 has been increased.
2544
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002545- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2546 executed.
2547
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002548- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2549 postinstallation script.
2550
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002551- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2552 test the current module.
2553
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002554- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002555 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2556 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2557 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2558 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2559
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002560- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002561 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002562 Ward's Optik package.
2563
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002564- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2565 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2566 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2567 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2568
2569- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2570 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002571 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002572
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002573- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2574 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2575 shelf are binary pickles.
2576
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002577- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2578 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2579
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002580- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2581 modules are iterators now.
2582
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002583- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2584 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2585 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2586 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2587 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2588 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002589
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002590- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2591 with their entity value.
2592
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002593- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2594
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002595- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2596 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002597
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002598- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2599 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002600 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002601
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002602- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2603 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2604 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2605 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2606 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2607 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2608 main():
2609
2610 import locale
2611 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2612
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002613- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2614 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2615
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002616- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2617 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2618 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2619 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2620 to the new standard.
2621
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002622- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2623 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2624 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2625 an extension to the database.
2626
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002627- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2628 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2629 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2630 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002631 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002632
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002633- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002634 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002635
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002636- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2637 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2638 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2639 bounded integers.
2640
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002641- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2642 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2643 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2644 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2645 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2646 in existence.
2647
2648 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2649 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2650 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2651 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2652 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2653 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2654
2655 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2656 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2657 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2658 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2659
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002660- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2661 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2662 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2663
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002664- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2665
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002666- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2667 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2668 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2669 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2670
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002671- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2672 argument.
2673
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002674- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2675 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2676 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2677 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2678 [SF patch 560794].
2679
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002680- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2681 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2682 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002683 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2684 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2685 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002686
2687- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2688 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002689
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002690- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2691 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2692 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2693 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002694
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002695- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2696 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2697 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2698 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2699 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2700
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002701- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002702
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002703- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2704
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002705- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2706 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2707 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2708 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2709 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2710 identical to None.
2711
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002712- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2713 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2714 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2715 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2716 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2717 results now.
2718
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002719- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2720 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2721
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002722- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2723 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2724 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2725 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2726 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2727 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2728 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2729 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2730
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002731- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2732
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002733- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2734 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2735
2736- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2737 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2738 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2739 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2740 and other systems.
2741
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002742- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2743 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2744 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2745 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 +00002746 work well with these.
2747
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002748- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2749
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002750- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002751 connections.
2752
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002753- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2754 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2755 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2756
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002757- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2758 sets
2759
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002760- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2761 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2762 name.
2763
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002764- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2765 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2766 passed in.
2767
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002768- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002769 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002770 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2771 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002772
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002773- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2774
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002775- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2776
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002777- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2778 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2779 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2780
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002781- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2782 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2783 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2784 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002785 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002786
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002787- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002788 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002789 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002790
2791- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2792 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2793 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2794
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002795- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002796 the value of its expression argument.
2797
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002798- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2799 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2800 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2801
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002802- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2803 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2804 skipstone browser was included.
2805
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002806- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2807 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2808
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002809Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002810-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002811
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002812- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2813 names in addition to accepting file names.
2814
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002815- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2816 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2817 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2818 still used and useful.)
2819
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002820- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2821 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2822 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2823 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002824
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002825- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2826 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2827 the generated binary.
2828
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002829Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002830-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002831
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002832- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2833
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002834- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2835 except in the hands of experts.
2836
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002837- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002838 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2839 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2840 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002841
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002842- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2843 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2844 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2845 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2846 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2847 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2848 builds.
2849
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002850- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2851 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2852 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2853 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2854 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2855 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2856 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2857 new type.
2858
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002859- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002860
2861 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2862 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2863 positive infinities.
2864
2865 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2866 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2867 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2868 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2869 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2870 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2871 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2872
2873 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2874
2875 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2876
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002877- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2878 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2879 size of the executable.
2880
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002881- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2882 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2883 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2884 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002885
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002886- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2887
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002888- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2889 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2890 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002891
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002892- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2893 well as Unix.
2894
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002895- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2896 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2897 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2898 modules in the README file for details.
2899
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002900C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002901-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002902
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002903- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2904 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002905 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002906 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002907 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002908
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002909- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2910 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2911 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2912 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2913 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2914 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002915 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002916 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2917 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2918 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2919 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2920 aligned.)
2921
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002922- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2923 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2924 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2925
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002926- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2927 level.
2928
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002929- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2930 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2931 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2932 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2933 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2934
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002935- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2936 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2937 code.
2938
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002939- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2940 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2941 adjusting for negative indices.
2942
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002943- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2944 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2945 object.
2946
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002947- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2948 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2949 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2950
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002951- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2952 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002953
2954- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2955
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002956- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2957 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2958 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2959 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2960
2961- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2962
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002963- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002964
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002965- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002966 without going through the buffer API.
2967
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002968- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002969
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002970- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2971 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2972 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2973 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2974
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002975- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2976 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2977
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002978- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002979 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2980
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002981New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002982-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002983
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002984- OpenVMS is now supported.
2985
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002986- AtheOS is now supported.
2987
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002988- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2989
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002990- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2991
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002992Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002993-----
2994
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002995- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2996 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2997 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002998
2999Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003000-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003001
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003002- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3003 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3004 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3005 bugs.
3006 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003007 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003008 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3009 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003010 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003011
3012- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003013 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003014
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003015- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3016 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3017
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003018- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3019 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003020 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003021 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3022
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003023- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3024 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3025 use files" uninstall option).
3026
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003027- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3028
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003029- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3030 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3031
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003032- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3033 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3034 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3035
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003036- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3037 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3038 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3039 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3040 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003041 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3042 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3043 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003044
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003045- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003046 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003047 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3048 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3049 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3050 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3051 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3052 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3053 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3054 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3055 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3056 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3057 work around.
3058
3059- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3060 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3061 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3062 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3063 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3064 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3065 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3066 specified with O_CREAT too).
3067
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003068Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003069----
3070
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003071- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003072
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003073- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3074 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3075 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3076
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003077- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3078 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3079 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3080
3081- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3082 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3083 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3084 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3085 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3086 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3087 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3088 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003089
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003090- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3091 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3092 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003093
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003094- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3095 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3096 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3097 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3098 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003099
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003100- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3101 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3102 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003103
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003104- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3105 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003106
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003107- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3108 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3109 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3110 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3111 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003112
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003113- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3114 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3115 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3116
3117- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3118 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3119 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003120
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003121- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3122 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3123 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3124 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003125 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003126
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003127- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3128 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003129
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003130- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3131 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003132
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003133- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003134 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003135 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3136 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003137
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003138
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003139What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003140===============================
3141
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003142*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3143
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003144Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003145--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003146
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003147- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3148 with a custom metaclass.
3149
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003150Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003151-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003152
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003153- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3154 are proxies.
3155
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003156Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003157-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003158
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003159- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3160 very short strings.
3161
3162- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3163 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3164 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3165 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3166 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3167
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003168Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003169-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003170
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003171- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3172 close or delete time).
3173
3174- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3175 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3176
3177- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3178
3179- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003180 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003181
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003182Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003183-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003184
3185Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003186-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003187
3188C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003189-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003190
3191New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003192-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003193
3194Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003195-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003196
3197Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003198-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003199
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003200- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3201
3202- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3203 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3204
3205- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3206 deleted at process exit time.
3207
3208- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3209 in backslash.
3210
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003211Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003212----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003213
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003214- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3215 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3216 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3217
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003218
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003219What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003220===========================
3221
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003222*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3223
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003224Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003225--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003226
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003227- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3228 been extensively updated. See
3229
3230 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3231
3232 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3233
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003234- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3235 deleted!
3236
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003237- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3238 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3239 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3240 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3241 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3242
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003243- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3244
3245 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3246 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3247
3248 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3249 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3250 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3251 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3252 supported anyway.
3253
3254 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3255 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3256
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003257- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3258 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3259 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3260 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3261 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003262
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003263- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3264 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3265 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3266
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003267Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003268-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003269
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003270- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3271 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3272 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3273 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3274 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3275 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003276 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3277 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3278 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3279 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003280
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003281- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3282 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3283 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3284
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003285Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003286-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003287
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003288- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3289
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003290Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003291-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003292
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003293- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3294 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3295 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3296 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3297 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3298 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3299
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003300- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3301
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003302- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3303
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003304- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3305
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003306- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3307 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3308 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3309
3310- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3311
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003312Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003313-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003314
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003315- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3316 off a search on Google.
3317
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003318Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003319-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003320
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003321- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3322 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3323 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3324 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3325 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3326 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3327 other platforms should do likewise.
3328
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003329- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3330 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3331 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3332
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003333C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003334-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003335
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003336- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3337 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3338 producing key-value pairs.
3339
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003340- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003341 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003342 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3343 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3344 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3345 previously went unchallenged.
3346
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003347New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003348-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003349
3350Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003351-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003352
3353Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003354-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003355
3356Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003357----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003358
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003359- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3360 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003361
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003362- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3363 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3364 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3365 home.
3366
3367
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003368What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003369===========================
3370
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003371*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3372
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003373Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003374--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003375
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003376- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3377 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003378
3379 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003380 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003381
3382 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3383 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003384 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003385 This needs to be documented.
3386
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003387- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3388 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3389
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003390- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3391 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3392 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3393
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003394- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3395 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3396
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003397- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3398 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3399 class forbids it).
3400
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003401- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3402 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3403 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3404
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003405- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3406
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003407Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003408-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003409
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003410- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3411 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003412 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003413
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003414- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3415 (like 1 + '').
3416
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003417Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003418-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003419
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003420- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3421 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3422 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3423 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003424 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003425 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3426
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003427- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3428 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3429 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3430 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3431
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003432- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3433 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003434 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3435 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3436 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003437
3438- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3439 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003440
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003441- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3442 bytes on its input.
3443
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003444Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003445-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003446
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003447- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003448 convenience function.
3449
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003450- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3451 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3452 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003453 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3454 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3455 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3456 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3457 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3458 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003459
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003460- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3461 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3462 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3463 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3464
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003465- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3466 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3467 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3468
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003469- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3470 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3471 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3472 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3473
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003474- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3475 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003476 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003477 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3478 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3479 new -l and -e options.
3480
3481- statcache is now deprecated.
3482
3483- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3484 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003485 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003486 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3487 time properly taken into account.
3488
3489- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3490 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3491 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3492 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3493
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003494Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003495-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003496
3497Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003498-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003499
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003500- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3501 is built with libdb3 if available.
3502
3503- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3504
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003505C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003506-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003507
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003508- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3509 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3510 PySequence_Size().
3511
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003512- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3513
3514- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3515 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3516 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3517
3518- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3519 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3520
3521- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3522 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3523
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003524New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003525-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003526
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003527- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3528 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3529
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003530- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3531 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3532
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003533- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3534
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003535Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003536-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003537
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003538- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3539 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3540
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003541Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003542-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003543
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003544Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003545----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003546
3547- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3548 removed completely in the next release.
3549
3550- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3551 OSX.
3552
3553- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3554 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3555
3556- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3557
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003558
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003559What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003560===========================
3561
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003562*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3563
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003564Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003565--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003566
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003567- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003568 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003569 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003570 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3571 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003572 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3573 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003574 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3575 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003576
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003577- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3578 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3579
3580- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3581 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3582
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003583Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003584-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003585
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003586- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3587 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3588 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3589 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3590 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3591 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3592 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3593 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3594
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003595- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3596 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3597 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3598 example).
3599
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003600- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003601 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003602 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003603 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003604
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003605- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3606 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3607 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003608 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003609
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003610- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3611 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3612 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3613 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3614 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3615 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3616
3617 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3618
3619 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3620
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003621Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003622-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003623
3624- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3625
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003626- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3627
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003628- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3629 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003630
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003631- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3632 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3633 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3634 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3635 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3636 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003637 attributes.
3638
3639- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3640 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3641 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003642
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003643- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3644 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3645 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003646
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003647- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3648 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3649 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003650 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3651 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3652
3653- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3654 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003655
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003656Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003657-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003658
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003659- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3660 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3661
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003662- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3663 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3664 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3665 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3666
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003667- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3668 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3669 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3670 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3671
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003672 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3673 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3674 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3675 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3676 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3677 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3678 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3679 without losing information).
3680
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003681- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003682 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3683 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3684 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3685 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3686 module).
3687
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003688 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003689 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3690 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3691 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3692 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003693
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003694- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003695 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3696 encoding.
3697
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003698- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3699 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3700
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003701- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003702 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3703
3704- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3705 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3706 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3707 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3708
3709- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3710
3711- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3712 ON, and OFF.
3713
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003714- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3715 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3716
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003717Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003718-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003719
3720- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3721 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3722 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003723
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003724- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3725 been added: -X and -E.
3726
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003727Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003728-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003729
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003730- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3731 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3732
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003733C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003734-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003735
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003736- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3737 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3738 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3739 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3740 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3741
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003742- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3743 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3744 as long) arguments.
3745
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003746- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3747 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3748 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3749 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3750 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3751 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3752
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003753- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3754 input.
3755
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003756New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003757-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003758
3759Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003760-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003761
3762Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003763-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003764
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003765- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3766 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3767 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3768
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003769- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3770 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3771 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003772 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003773
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003774 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3775 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3776 import signal
3777 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003778
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003779 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003780 while 1:
3781 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003782 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003783 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3784 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3785 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3786 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003787
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003788
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003789What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3790===========================
3791
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003792*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3793
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003794Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003795--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003796
3797- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3798 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3799 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3800
3801- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3802 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3803 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3804 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3805 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3806 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3807 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003808
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003809- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003810 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003811 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3812 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3813 associate a docstring with a property.
3814
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003815- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3816 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3817 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3818 other built-in object types.
3819
3820- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3821 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3822 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3823 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3824 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3825
3826- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3827 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3828
3829- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3830 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003831 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003832 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3833 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3834 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3835 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3836 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3837
3838- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3839 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3840 class.
3841
3842- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3843 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3844 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3845 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3846
3847- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3848 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3849 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3850 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3851
3852- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3853 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3854
3855- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3856 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3857 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3858 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3859 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003860 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003861 with the same value as s.
3862
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003863- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3864
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003865Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003866----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003867
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003868- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3869
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003870- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3871 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3872 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3873 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3874 objects.
3875
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003876- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3877 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003878 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3879 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3880
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003881- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3882 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3883 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3884
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003885Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003886-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003887
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003888- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3889 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3890 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3891 by the instances.
3892
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003893- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3894 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3895 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3896
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003897- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3898 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3899 before the entire comparison is complete.
3900
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003901- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3902 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3903 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3904
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003905- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3906 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3907 getwriter().
3908
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003909- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3910 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3911
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003912- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003913 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3914 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3915
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003916- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3917 iterable object.
3918
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003919- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3920 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003921
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003922- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3923 authentication.
3924
3925- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3926 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003927
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003928- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003929 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3930 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3931 a sample driver.)
3932
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003933Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003934-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003935
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003936- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3937 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3938 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3939 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3940 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3941 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3942 kernel has large file support.
3943
3944- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3945 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3946 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3947 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3948 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3949
3950- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3951 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3952 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3953
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003954C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003955-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003956
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003957- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3958 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3959
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003960New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003961-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003962
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003963- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3964 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3965
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003966Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003967-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003968
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003969- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3970 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3971 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3972 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3973 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3974
3975- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3976 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3977 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3978 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3979
3980- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3981 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3982
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003983Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003984-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003985
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003986- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003987 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3988 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003989
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003990
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003991What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3992===========================
3993
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003994*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3995
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003996Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003997----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003998
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003999- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4000 big to represent as a C double.
4001
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004002- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4003 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4004 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4005 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4006 restriction).
4007
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004008- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4009 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4010 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4011 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4012 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4013
4014 >>> dir([])
4015 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4016 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4017 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4018 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4019 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4020 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4021 'reverse', 'sort']
4022
4023 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4024
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004025- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004026 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4027 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4028 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4029 OverflowError exception.
4030
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004031- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004032 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004033 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4034 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4035 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4036 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4037 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004038 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004039 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4040 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4041
4042 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4043 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4044 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4045 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004046
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004047- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004048 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4049 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4050 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4051 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4052 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4053 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4054 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4055 once it is created.
4056
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004057- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4058 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4059 (key, value) pairs.
4060
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004061- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004062 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4063 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4064
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004065- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4066 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4067 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4068 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4069 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004070
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004071- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004072 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4073 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4074
4075 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4076
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004077- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004078 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4079
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004080Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004081-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004082
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004083- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004084 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4085 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004086
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004087- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4088 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4089 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4090 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4091 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4092 in this area anymore).
4093
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004094- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4095 threading.Timer.
4096
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004097- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4098 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4099
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004100- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004101 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4102
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004103- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004104 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4105 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4106 converted to Python longs.
4107
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004108- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004109 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4110
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004111- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4112 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4113 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4114
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004115Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004116-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004117
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004118- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4119 division operators as per PEP 238.
4120
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004121Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004122-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004123
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004124- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4125 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4126 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4127 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4128
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004129C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004130-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004131
4132- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004133
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004134- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4135 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004136 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004137
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004138 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4139 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004140 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004141 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004142
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004143- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004144 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4145 module:
4146
4147 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004148
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004149 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4150 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004151
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004152 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4153 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004154
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004155 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4156
4157 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4158
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004159- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004160 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4161 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4162 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004163
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004164New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004165-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004166
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004167- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4168 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4169 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4170 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4171 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004172
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004173Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004174-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004175
4176Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004177-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004178
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004179- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4180 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4181 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4182 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004183 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4184 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4185 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4186 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4187 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004188
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004189- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004190 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4191
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004192
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004193What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4194===========================
4195
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004196*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4197
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004198Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004199-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004200
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004201- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4202 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4203
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004204- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4205 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4206 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004207
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004208- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4209 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4210 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4211 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004212
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004213- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4214
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004215- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004216
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004217Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004218-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004219
4220- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004221 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004222 the module docstring for details.
4223
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004224Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004225-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004226
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004227- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004228 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4229 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4230 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004231
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004232- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4233 Nick Mathewson.
4234
4235Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004236----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004237
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004238- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4239 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4240 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4241 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4242 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4243 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4244 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4245 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4246
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004247- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4248 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4249 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4250 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4251
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004252- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4253 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4254 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4255 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4256 come a long way).
4257
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004258- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4259 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4260 write filters for these warnings).
4261
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004262- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4263 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4264 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4265 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4266 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4267
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004268- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4269 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4270 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4271 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4272 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4273 older distribution.
4274
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004275Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004276-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004277
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004278- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4279 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004280 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004281
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004282- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4283 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4284 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4285
4286- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4287
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004288- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4289
4290- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4291
4292- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4293
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004294- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004295
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004296- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4297
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004298New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004299-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004300
4301C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004302-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004303
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004304- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4305 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4306 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4307 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4308 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4309 against buffer overruns.
4310
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004311- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004312 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4313 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004314 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4315 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4316 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4317
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004318- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4319 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4320 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4321 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4322 deprecated.
4323
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004324Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004325-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004326
4327- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4328 relevant is found.
4329
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004330
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004331What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004332===========================
4333
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004334*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4335
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004336Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004338
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004339- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4340 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4341 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4342 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4343 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4344 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4345 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4346 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004347 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004348 repaired.
4349
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004350- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004351 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004352 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4353 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4354 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4355 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4356 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4357 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4358 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4359 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4360
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004361- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4362 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4363 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4364 leading BMO character).
4365
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004366- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4367 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4368 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4369
4370 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4371 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4372 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004373
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004374 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4375 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4376 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4377 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4378 for various simple to use conversions.
4379
4380 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4381 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4382
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004383 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4384 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4385 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4386 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4387 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4388 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4389 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4390 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4391 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4392 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4393 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4394 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4395 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4396 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4397 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004398
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004399- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4400 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4401 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004402 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004403 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004404
4405 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004406 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4407 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4408 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4409 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4410 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004411 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4412 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004413
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004414 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4415 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4416 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004417 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004418
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004419- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4420 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4421 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4422 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4423 floating arithmetic,
4424
4425 x = 9007199254740992.0
4426 print long(x)
4427
4428 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4429 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4430 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4431 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4432 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4433 functions are of good quality).
4434
4435 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4436 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4437 algorithms to break.
4438
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004439- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4440 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4441 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4442 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4443 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4444 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4445 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4446 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4447 order.
4448
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004449- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4450 operation along the most common code paths.
4451
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004452- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4453 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4454
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004455- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4456 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4457 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4458 {}.update(UserDict())
4459
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004460- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4461 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4462 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4463 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4464 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4465 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4466 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4467 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4468
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004469- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004470 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004471
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004472 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004473 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4474 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004475 join() method of strings
4476 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004477 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4478 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004479 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004480 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004481
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004482- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4483 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4484
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004485- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4486 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4487
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004488- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4489 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4490 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4491 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4492
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004493- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4494 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004495 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004496 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4497 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004498
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004499- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4500
4501
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004502Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004503-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004504
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004505- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004506 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004507 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4508 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4509
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004510- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4511 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4512
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004513- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4514 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4515 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4516 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4517
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004518- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4519 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4520 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4521
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004522- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4523
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004524- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4525
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004526- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4527 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4528 that are still imported into string.py).
4529
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004530- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4531
4532- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4533 Now it does.
4534
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004535- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4536
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004537- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4538 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4539 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4540 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4541 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004542 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4543 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004544
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004545- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4546 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4547 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4548 'help(object)'.
4549
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004550Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004551-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004552
4553- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004554 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004555 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4556 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4557
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004558- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004559 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4560 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004561
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004562C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004563-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004564
4565- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4566 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004567
4568----
4569
4570**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**