blob: 0969651a0f1cdf453e2474012e51af9865512ca0 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000011
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +000015- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
16
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +000017- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
18 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
19 arguments.
20
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000021Extension modules
22-----------------
23
24- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
25
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000026- datetime changes:
27
28 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
29 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>.
30
Tim Peters710fb152003-01-02 19:35:54 +000031 In dt.asdatetime(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000032 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Peters710fb152003-01-02 19:35:54 +000033 as 0 instead).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000034
35 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
36 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
37 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
38 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
39
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000040Library
41-------
42
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +000043- realpath is now exported when doing from poxixpath import *.
44 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
45 See SF bug #659228.
46
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000047
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000048Tools/Demos
49-----------
50
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000051TBD
52
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000053Build
54-----
55
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +000056- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
57 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
58 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
59 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
60 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
61 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
62 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
63 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
64 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
65
66- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
67 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
68 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
69 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
70
71- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
72 from the Tools/scripts directory.
73
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000074C API
75-----
76
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000077TBD
78
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000079New platforms
80-------------
81
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000082TBD
83
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000084Tests
85-----
86
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000087TBD
88
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000089Windows
90-------
91
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +000092- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
93 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
94
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000095Mac
96---
97
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000098TBD
99
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000100
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000101What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000102=================================
103
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000104*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000105
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000106Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000107--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000108
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000109- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
110
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000111- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
112 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000113 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000114 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000115 a different meaning than before.
116
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000117- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000118 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000119 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000120
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000121- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000122 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000123 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000124
125- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
126 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
127 and deallocation.
128
129- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
130 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
131
132- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
133 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
134 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
135 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
136 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
137
138- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
139 now detected by the garbage collector.
140
141- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
142 [SF bug 519621]
143
144- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
145 identifier.
146
147- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
148 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
149 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
150 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
151 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
152 [SF bug 563060]
153
154- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
155 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
156 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
157 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
158 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
159
160- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
161 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
162 not called. [SF bug #537450]
163
164- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
165
166- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
167 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
168 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
169 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
170 state of the slots would be lost.)
171
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000172Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000173-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000174
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000175- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000176 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
177 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
178 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
179 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000180 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
181 Jython 2.1.
182
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000183- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000184 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000185 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
186 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
187 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
188 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
189 these, see PEP 302.
190
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000191- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
192 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
193 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
194
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000195- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
196 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
197 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
198
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000199- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
200 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
201 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
202
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000203- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
204 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
205 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
206 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
207 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
208 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
209 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
210 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
211 releases or implementations.
212
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000213- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000214 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
215 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000216
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000217- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
218 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
219
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000220- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
221 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
222 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
223
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000224- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
225 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
226
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000227- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
228 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000229 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
230 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000231
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000232- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
233 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
234 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
235 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
236 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
237
238 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
239 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
240 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
241 pattern.
242
243 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
244 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
245 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
246 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
247
248 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
249 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
250 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
251 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
252 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
253 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
254
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000255- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
256 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
257 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
258 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
259 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
260 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
261 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
262 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000263
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000264- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
265 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
266 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
267 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
268 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000269 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
270 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
271 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
272 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
273 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
274 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
275 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000276
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000277- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
278 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
279
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000280- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
281 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
282 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
283 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
284 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
285 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
286 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
287 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
288 to Zack Weinberg!
289
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000290- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
291 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
292 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
293 type. This has been fixed now.
294
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000295- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
296 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
297 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
298
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000299- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
300 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
301 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
302 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
303 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
304 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
305 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
306 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000307 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000308
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000309- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
310 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
311 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000312
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000313- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
314 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
315 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
316 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
317 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
318 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
319 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
320 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000321 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000322 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
323 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
324
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000325- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
326 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
327 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
328 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
329 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
330 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
331 this.)
332
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000333- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
334 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000335 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000336 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000337 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
338 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000339 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
340 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000341
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000342- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
343 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
344 currently running.
345
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000346- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
347 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
348 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
349 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
350
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000351- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
352 as directory names.
353
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000354- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
355 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
356
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000357- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
358 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
359
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000360- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000361 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
362 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000363
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000364- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
365 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
366 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
367 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
368 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
369
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000370- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
371 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
372 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
373 removed.
374
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000375- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
376 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
377 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
378
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000379- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
380 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
381 to __debug__.
382
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000383- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
384 string to the left with zeros. For example,
385 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
386
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000387- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
388 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
389 deprecated now.
390
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000391- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
392 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
393 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000394
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000395- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
396 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
397 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
398 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
399 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000400
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000401- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
402 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
403
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000404- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
405 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
406 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000407 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000408 is backward compatible.
409
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000410- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
411 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
412 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
413 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
414 could access a pointer to freed memory.
415
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000416- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
417 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
418 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
419 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
420 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
421 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000422
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000423- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
424 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
425
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000426- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
427 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
428
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000429- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
430 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
431 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
432 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
433 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
434
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000435- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
436 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
437 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
438
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000439- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000440 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
441
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000442- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
443 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
444 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000445
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000446- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
447 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
448
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000449- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
450 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
451 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
452
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000453Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000454-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000455
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000456- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
457
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000458- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
459 archives.
460
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000461- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
462 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
463 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
464
465 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
466
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000467- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
468 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
469 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000470 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000471
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000472- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
473 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
474 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
475 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
476 3.0 to 4.1.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000477
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000478- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
479 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000480
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000481- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
482
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000483- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
484 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
485
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000486- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
487 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
488 supported.
489
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000490- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
491
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000492- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
493 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000494
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000495- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
496 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
497
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000498- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
499
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000500- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
501 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
502
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000503- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
504 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
505 functions but callable type objects.
506
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000507- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000508 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000509 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000510
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000511- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
512 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000513
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000514- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
515 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000516
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000517- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
518 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
519 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
520 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
521
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000522- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
523 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000524
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000525- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
526 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
527 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
528 and __imul__.
529
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000530- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000531 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
532 is called.
533
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000534- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
535 been added where available.
536
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000537- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
538 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
539 interpreter was compiled.
540
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000541- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
542 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
543 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000544 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000545 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
546 1, not 2.
547
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000548- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
549 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
550 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
551 limit.
552
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000553- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
554 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
555 bug #623464.
556
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +0000557- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
558 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
559 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
560 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
561
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000562Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000563-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000564
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +0000565- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
566
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000567- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
568 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
569 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
570 with Python 2.3a2.
571
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000572- os.path exposes getctime.
573
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000574- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
575 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
576 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
577 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
578 unit tests of floating point results.
579
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000580- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
581 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
582 has been increased.
583
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000584- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
585 executed.
586
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000587- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
588 postinstallation script.
589
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000590- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
591 test the current module.
592
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000593- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
594 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
595 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
596 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
597 this behavior needs to be controlled.
598
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000599- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000600 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000601 Ward's Optik package.
602
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000603- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
604 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
605 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
606 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
607
608- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
609 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000610 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000611
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000612- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
613 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
614 shelf are binary pickles.
615
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000616- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
617 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
618
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000619- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
620 modules are iterators now.
621
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000622- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
623 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
624 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
625 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
626 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
627 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000628
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000629- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
630 with their entity value.
631
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000632- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
633
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000634- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
635 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000636
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000637- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
638 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000639 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000640
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000641- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
642 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
643 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
644 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
645 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
646 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
647 main():
648
649 import locale
650 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
651
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000652- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
653 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
654
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000655- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
656 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
657 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
658 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
659 to the new standard.
660
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000661- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
662 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
663 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
664 an extension to the database.
665
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000666- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
667 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
668 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
669 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000670 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000671
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000672- Added operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to a**b.
673
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000674- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000675 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000676
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000677- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
678 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
679 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
680 bounded integers.
681
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +0000682- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
683 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
684 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
685 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
686 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
687 in existence.
688
689 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
690 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
691 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
692 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
693 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
694 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
695
696 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
697 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
698 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
699 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
700
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000701- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
702 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
703 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
704
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000705- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
706
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000707- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
708 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
709 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
710 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
711
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000712- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
713 argument.
714
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000715- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
716 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
717 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
718 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
719 [SF patch 560794].
720
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000721- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
722 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
723 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000724 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
725 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
726 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000727
728- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
729 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000730
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000731- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
732 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
733 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
734 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000735
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000736- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
737 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
738 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
739 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
740 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
741
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000742- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000743
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +0000744- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
745
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000746- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
747 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
748 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
749 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
750 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
751 identical to None.
752
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000753- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
754 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
755 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
756 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
757 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
758 results now.
759
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000760- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
761 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
762
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000763- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
764 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
765 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
766 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
767 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
768 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
769 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
770 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
771
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000772- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
773
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000774- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
775 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
776
777- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
778 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
779 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
780 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
781 and other systems.
782
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000783- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
784 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
785 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
786 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 +0000787 work well with these.
788
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000789- compileall now supports quiet operation.
790
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000791- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000792 connections.
793
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000794- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
795 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
796 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
797
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000798- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
799 sets
800
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000801- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
802 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
803 name.
804
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000805- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
806 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
807 passed in.
808
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000809- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000810 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000811 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
812 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000813
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000814- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
815
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000816- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
817
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000818- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
819 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
820 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
821
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000822- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
823 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
824 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
825 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +0000826 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000827
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000828- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000829 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000830 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000831
832- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
833 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
834 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
835
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000836- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +0000837 the value of its expression argument.
838
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000839- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
840 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
841 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
842
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +0000843- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
844 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
845 skipstone browser was included.
846
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +0000847- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
848 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
849
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000850Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000851-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000852
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +0000853- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
854 names in addition to accepting file names.
855
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +0000856- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
857 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
858 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
859 still used and useful.)
860
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000861- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
862 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
863 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
864 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +0000865
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000866- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
867 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
868 the generated binary.
869
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000870Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000871-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000872
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +0000873- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
874
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000875- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
876 except in the hands of experts.
877
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000878- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000879 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
880 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
881 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +0000882
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +0000883- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
884 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
885 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
886 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
887 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
888 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
889 builds.
890
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000891- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
892 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
893 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
894 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
895 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
896 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
897 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
898 new type.
899
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000900- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +0000901
902 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
903 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
904 positive infinities.
905
906 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
907 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
908 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
909 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
910 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
911 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
912 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
913
914 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
915
916 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
917
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +0000918- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
919 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
920 size of the executable.
921
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000922- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
923 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
924 configure script. On other platforms, remove
925 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +0000926
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +0000927- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
928
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +0000929- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
930 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
931 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +0000932
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +0000933- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
934 well as Unix.
935
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +0000936- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
937 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
938 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
939 modules in the README file for details.
940
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000941C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000942-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000943
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000944- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
945 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000946 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +0000947 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +0000948 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +0000949
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000950- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
951 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
952 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
953 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
954 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
955 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
956 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
957 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
958 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
959 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
960 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
961 aligned.)
962
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +0000963- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
964 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
965 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
966
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000967- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
968 level.
969
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +0000970- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
971 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
972 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
973 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
974 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
975
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +0000976- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
977 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
978 code.
979
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +0000980- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
981 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
982 adjusting for negative indices.
983
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000984- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
985 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
986 object.
987
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +0000988- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
989 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
990 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
991
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000992- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
993 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +0000994
995- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
996
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +0000997- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
998 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
999 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1000 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1001
1002- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1003
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001004- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001005
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001006- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001007 without going through the buffer API.
1008
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001009- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001010
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001011- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1012 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1013 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1014 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1015
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001016- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1017 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1018
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001019- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001020 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1021
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001022New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001023-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001024
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001025- OpenVMS is now supported.
1026
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001027- AtheOS is now supported.
1028
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001029- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1030
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001031- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1032
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001033Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001034-----
1035
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001036- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1037 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1038 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001039
1040Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001041-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001042
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001043- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1044 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1045 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1046 bugs.
1047 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001048 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1049 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1050 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001051 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001052
1053- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001054 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001055
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001056- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1057 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1058
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001059- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1060 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1061 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1062 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1063
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001064- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1065 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1066 use files" uninstall option).
1067
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001068- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1069
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001070- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1071 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1072
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001073- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1074 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1075 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1076
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001077- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1078 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1079 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1080 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1081 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001082 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1083 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1084 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001085
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001086- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001087 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001088 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1089 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1090 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1091 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1092 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1093 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1094 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1095 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1096 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1097 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1098 work around.
1099
1100- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1101 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1102 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1103 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1104 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1105 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1106 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1107 specified with O_CREAT too).
1108
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001109Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001110----
1111
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001112- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001113
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001114- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1115 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1116 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1117
1118- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1119 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1120 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1121 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1122 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1123 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1124 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1125 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001126
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001127- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1128 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1129 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001130
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001131- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1132 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1133 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1134 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1135 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001136
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001137- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1138 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1139 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001140
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001141- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1142 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001143
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001144- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1145 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1146 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1147 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1148 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001149
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001150- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1151 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1152 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1153
1154- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1155 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1156 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001157
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001158- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1159 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1160 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1161 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1162 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001163
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001164- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1165 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001166
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001167- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1168 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001169
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001170What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001171===============================
1172
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001173*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1174
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001175Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001176--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001177
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001178- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1179 with a custom metaclass.
1180
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001181Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001182-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001183
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001184- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1185 are proxies.
1186
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001187Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001188-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001189
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001190- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1191 very short strings.
1192
1193- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1194 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1195 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1196 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1197 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1198
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001199Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001200-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001201
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001202- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1203 close or delete time).
1204
1205- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1206 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1207
1208- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1209
1210- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001211 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001212
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001213Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001214-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001215
1216Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001217-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001218
1219C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001220-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001221
1222New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001223-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001224
1225Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001226-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001227
1228Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001229-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001230
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001231- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1232
1233- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1234 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1235
1236- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1237 deleted at process exit time.
1238
1239- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1240 in backslash.
1241
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001242Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001243----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001244
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001245- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1246 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1247 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1248
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001249
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001250What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001251===========================
1252
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001253*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1254
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001255Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001256--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001257
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001258- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1259 been extensively updated. See
1260
1261 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1262
1263 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1264
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001265- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1266 deleted!
1267
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001268- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1269 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1270 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1271 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1272 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1273
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001274- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1275
1276 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1277 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1278
1279 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1280 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1281 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1282 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1283 supported anyway.
1284
1285 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1286 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1287
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001288- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1289 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1290 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1291 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1292 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001293
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001294- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1295 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1296 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1297
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001298Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001299-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001300
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001301- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1302 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1303 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1304 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1305 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1306 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001307 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1308 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1309 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1310 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001311
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001312- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1313 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1314 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1315
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001316Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001317-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001318
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001319- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1320
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001321Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001322-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001323
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001324- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1325 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1326 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1327 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1328 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1329 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1330
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001331- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1332
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001333- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1334
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001335- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1336
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001337- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1338 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1339 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1340
1341- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1342
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001343Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001344-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001345
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001346- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1347 off a search on Google.
1348
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001349Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001350-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001351
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001352- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1353 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1354 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1355 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1356 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1357 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1358 other platforms should do likewise.
1359
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001360- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1361 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1362 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1363
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001364C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001365-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001366
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001367- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1368 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1369 producing key-value pairs.
1370
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001371- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001372 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001373 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1374 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1375 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1376 previously went unchallenged.
1377
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001378New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001379-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001380
1381Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001382-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001383
1384Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001385-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001386
1387Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001388----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001389
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001390- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1391 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001392
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001393- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1394 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1395 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1396 home.
1397
1398
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001399What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001400===========================
1401
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001402*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1403
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001404Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001405--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001406
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001407- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1408 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001409
1410 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001411 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001412
1413 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1414 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001415 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001416 This needs to be documented.
1417
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001418- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1419 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1420
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001421- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1422 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1423 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1424
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001425- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1426 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1427
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001428- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1429 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1430 class forbids it).
1431
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001432- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1433 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1434 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1435
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001436- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1437
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001438Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001439-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001440
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001441- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1442 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001443 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001444
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001445- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1446 (like 1 + '').
1447
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001448Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001449-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001450
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001451- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1452 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1453 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1454 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001455 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001456 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1457
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001458- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1459 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1460 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1461 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1462
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001463- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1464 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001465 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1466 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1467 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001468
1469- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1470 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001471
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001472- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1473 bytes on its input.
1474
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001475Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001476-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001477
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001478- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001479 convenience function.
1480
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001481- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1482 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1483 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001484 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1485 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1486 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1487 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1488 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1489 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001490
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001491- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1492 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1493 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1494 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1495
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001496- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1497 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1498 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1499
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001500- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1501 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1502 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1503 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1504
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001505- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1506 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001507 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001508 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1509 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1510 new -l and -e options.
1511
1512- statcache is now deprecated.
1513
1514- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1515 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001516 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001517 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1518 time properly taken into account.
1519
1520- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1521 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1522 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1523 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1524
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001525Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001526-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001527
1528Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001529-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001530
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001531- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1532 is built with libdb3 if available.
1533
1534- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1535
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001536C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001537-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001538
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001539- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1540 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1541 PySequence_Size().
1542
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001543- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1544
1545- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1546 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1547 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1548
1549- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1550 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1551
1552- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1553 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1554
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001555New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001556-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001557
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001558- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1559 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1560
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001561- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1562 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1563
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001564- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1565
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001566Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001567-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001568
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001569- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1570 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1571
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001572Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001573-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001574
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001575Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001576----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001577
1578- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1579 removed completely in the next release.
1580
1581- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1582 OSX.
1583
1584- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1585 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1586
1587- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1588
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001589
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001590What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001591===========================
1592
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001593*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1594
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001595Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001596--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001597
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001598- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001599 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001600 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001601 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1602 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001603 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1604 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001605 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1606 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001607
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001608- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1609 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1610
1611- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1612 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1613
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001614Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001615-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001616
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001617- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1618 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1619 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1620 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1621 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1622 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1623 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1624 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1625
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001626- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1627 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1628 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1629 example).
1630
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001631- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001632 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001633 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001634 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001635
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001636- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1637 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1638 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001639 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001640
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001641- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1642 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1643 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1644 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1645 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1646 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1647
1648 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1649
1650 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1651
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001652Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001653-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001654
1655- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1656
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001657- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1658
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001659- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1660 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001661
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001662- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1663 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1664 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1665 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1666 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1667 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001668 attributes.
1669
1670- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1671 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1672 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001673
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001674- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1675 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1676 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001677
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001678- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1679 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1680 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001681 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1682 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1683
1684- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1685 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001686
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001687Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001688-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001689
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001690- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1691 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1692
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001693- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1694 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1695 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1696 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1697
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001698- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1699 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1700 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1701 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1702
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001703 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1704 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1705 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1706 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1707 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1708 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1709 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1710 without losing information).
1711
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001712- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001713 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1714 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1715 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1716 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1717 module).
1718
1719 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1720 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1721 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1722 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1723 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001724
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001725- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001726 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1727 encoding.
1728
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001729- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1730 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1731
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001732- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001733 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1734
1735- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1736 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1737 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1738 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1739
1740- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1741
1742- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1743 ON, and OFF.
1744
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001745- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1746 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1747
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001748Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001749-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001750
1751- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1752 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1753 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001754
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001755- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1756 been added: -X and -E.
1757
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001758Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001759-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001760
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001761- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1762 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1763
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001764C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001765-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001766
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001767- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1768 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1769 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1770 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1771 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1772
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001773- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1774 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1775 as long) arguments.
1776
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001777- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1778 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1779 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1780 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1781 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1782 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1783
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001784- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1785 input.
1786
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001787New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001788-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001789
1790Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001791-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001792
1793Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001794-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001795
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001796- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1797 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1798 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1799
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001800- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1801 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1802 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001803 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001804
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001805 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1806 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1807 import signal
1808 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001809
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001810 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001811 while 1:
1812 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001813 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001814 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1815 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1816 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1817 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001818
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001819
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001820What's New in Python 2.2a4?
1821===========================
1822
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001823*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
1824
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001825Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001826--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001827
1828- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1829 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1830 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1831
1832- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1833 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1834 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1835 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1836 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1837 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1838 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001839
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001840- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001841 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001842 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1843 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1844 associate a docstring with a property.
1845
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001846- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1847 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1848 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1849 other built-in object types.
1850
1851- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1852 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1853 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1854 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1855 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1856
1857- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1858 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1859
1860- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1861 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001862 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001863 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1864 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1865 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1866 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1867 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1868
1869- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1870 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1871 class.
1872
1873- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1874 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1875 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1876 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1877
1878- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1879 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1880 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
1881 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
1882
1883- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
1884 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
1885
1886- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
1887 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
1888 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
1889 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
1890 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001891 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001892 with the same value as s.
1893
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001894- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
1895
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001896Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001897----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001898
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00001899- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
1900
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00001901- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
1902 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
1903 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
1904 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
1905 objects.
1906
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001907- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
1908 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00001909 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
1910 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
1911
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001912- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
1913 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
1914 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
1915
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001916Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001917-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001918
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00001919- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1920 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
1921 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
1922 by the instances.
1923
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00001924- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
1925 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
1926 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
1927
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001928- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
1929 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
1930 before the entire comparison is complete.
1931
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00001932- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1933 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
1934 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
1935
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00001936- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
1937 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
1938 getwriter().
1939
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001940- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
1941 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
1942
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00001943- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001944 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
1945 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
1946
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00001947- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
1948 iterable object.
1949
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001950- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
1951 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001952
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001953- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
1954 authentication.
1955
1956- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
1957 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001958
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001959- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001960 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
1961 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
1962 a sample driver.)
1963
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001964Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001965-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001966
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001967- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
1968 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
1969 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
1970 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
1971 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
1972 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
1973 kernel has large file support.
1974
1975- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
1976 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
1977 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
1978 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
1979 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
1980
1981- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
1982 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
1983 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
1984
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001985C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001986-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001987
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001988- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
1989 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
1990
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001991New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001992-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001993
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001994- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
1995 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
1996
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001997Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001998-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001999
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002000- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2001 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2002 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2003 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2004 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2005
2006- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2007 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2008 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2009 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2010
2011- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2012 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2013
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002014Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002015-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002016
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002017- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002018 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2019 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002020
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002021
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002022What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2023===========================
2024
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002025*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2026
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002027Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002028----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002029
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002030- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2031 big to represent as a C double.
2032
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002033- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2034 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2035 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2036 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2037 restriction).
2038
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002039- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2040 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2041 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2042 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2043 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2044
2045 >>> dir([])
2046 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2047 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2048 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2049 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2050 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2051 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2052 'reverse', 'sort']
2053
2054 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2055
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002056- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002057 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2058 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2059 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2060 OverflowError exception.
2061
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002062- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002063 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002064 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2065 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2066 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2067 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2068 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002069 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002070 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2071 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2072
2073 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2074 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2075 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2076 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002077
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002078- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002079 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2080 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2081 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2082 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2083 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2084 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2085 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2086 once it is created.
2087
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002088- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2089 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2090 (key, value) pairs.
2091
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002092- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002093 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2094 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2095
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002096- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2097 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2098 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2099 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2100 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002101
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002102- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002103 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2104 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2105
2106 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2107
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002108- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002109 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2110
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002111Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002112-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002113
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002114- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002115 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2116 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002117
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002118- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2119 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2120 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2121 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2122 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2123 in this area anymore).
2124
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002125- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2126 threading.Timer.
2127
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002128- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2129 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2130
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002131- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002132 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2133
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002134- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002135 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2136 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2137 converted to Python longs.
2138
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002139- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002140 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2141
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002142- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2143 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2144 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2145
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002146Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002147-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002148
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002149- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2150 division operators as per PEP 238.
2151
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002152Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002153-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002154
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002155- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2156 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2157 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2158 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2159
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002160C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002161-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002162
2163- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002164
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002165- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2166 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002167 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002168
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002169 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2170 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002171 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002172 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002173
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002174- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002175 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2176 module:
2177
2178 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002179
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002180 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2181 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002182
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002183 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2184 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002185
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002186 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2187
2188 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2189
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002190- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002191 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2192 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2193 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002194
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002195New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002196-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002197
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002198- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2199 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2200 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2201 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2202 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002203
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002204Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002205-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002206
2207Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002208-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002209
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002210- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2211 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2212 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2213 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002214 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2215 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2216 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2217 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2218 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002219
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002220- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002221 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2222
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002223
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002224What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2225===========================
2226
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002227*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2228
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002229Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002230-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002231
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002232- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2233 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2234
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002235- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2236 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2237 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002238
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002239- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2240 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2241 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2242 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002243
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002244- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2245
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002246- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002247
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002248Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002249-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002250
2251- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002252 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002253 the module docstring for details.
2254
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002255Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002256-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002257
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002258- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002259 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2260 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2261 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002262
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002263- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2264 Nick Mathewson.
2265
2266Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002267----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002268
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002269- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2270 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2271 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2272 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2273 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2274 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2275 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2276 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2277
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002278- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2279 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2280 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2281 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2282
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002283- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2284 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2285 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2286 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2287 come a long way).
2288
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002289- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2290 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2291 write filters for these warnings).
2292
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002293- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2294 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2295 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2296 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2297 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2298
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002299- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2300 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2301 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2302 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2303 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2304 older distribution.
2305
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002306Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002307-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002308
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002309- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2310 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002311 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002312
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002313- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2314 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2315 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2316
2317- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2318
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002319- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2320
2321- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2322
2323- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2324
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002325- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002326
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002327- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2328
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002329New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002330-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002331
2332C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002333-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002334
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002335- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2336 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2337 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2338 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2339 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2340 against buffer overruns.
2341
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002342- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002343 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2344 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002345 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2346 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2347 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2348
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002349- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2350 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2351 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2352 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2353 deprecated.
2354
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002355Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002356-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002357
2358- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2359 relevant is found.
2360
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002361
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002362What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002363===========================
2364
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002365*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2366
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002367Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002368----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002369
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002370- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2371 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2372 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2373 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2374 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2375 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2376 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2377 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002378 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002379 repaired.
2380
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002381- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002382 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002383 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2384 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2385 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2386 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2387 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2388 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2389 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2390 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2391
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002392- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2393 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2394 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2395 leading BMO character).
2396
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002397- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2398 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2399 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2400
2401 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2402 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2403 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002404
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002405 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2406 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2407 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2408 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2409 for various simple to use conversions.
2410
2411 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2412 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2413
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002414 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2415 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2416 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2417 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2418 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2419 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2420 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2421 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2422 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2423 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2424 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2425 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2426 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2427 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2428 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002429
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002430- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2431 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2432 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002433 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002434 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002435
2436 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002437 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2438 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2439 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2440 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2441 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002442 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2443 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002444
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002445 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2446 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2447 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002448 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002449
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002450- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2451 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2452 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2453 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2454 floating arithmetic,
2455
2456 x = 9007199254740992.0
2457 print long(x)
2458
2459 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2460 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2461 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2462 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2463 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2464 functions are of good quality).
2465
2466 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2467 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2468 algorithms to break.
2469
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002470- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2471 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2472 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2473 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2474 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2475 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2476 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2477 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2478 order.
2479
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002480- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2481 operation along the most common code paths.
2482
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002483- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2484 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2485
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002486- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2487 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2488 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2489 {}.update(UserDict())
2490
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002491- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2492 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2493 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2494 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2495 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2496 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2497 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2498 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2499
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002500- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002501 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002502
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002503 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002504 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2505 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002506 join() method of strings
2507 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002508 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2509 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002510 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002511 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002512
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002513- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2514 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2515
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002516- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2517 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2518
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002519- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2520 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2521 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2522 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2523
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002524- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2525 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002526 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002527 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2528 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002529
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002530- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2531
2532
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002533Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002534-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002535
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002536- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002537 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002538 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2539 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2540
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002541- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2542 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2543
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002544- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2545 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2546 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2547 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2548
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002549- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2550 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2551 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2552
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002553- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2554
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002555- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2556
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002557- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2558 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2559 that are still imported into string.py).
2560
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002561- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2562
2563- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2564 Now it does.
2565
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002566- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2567
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002568- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2569 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2570 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2571 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2572 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002573 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2574 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002575
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002576- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2577 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2578 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2579 'help(object)'.
2580
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002581Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002582-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002583
2584- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002585 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002586 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2587 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2588
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002589- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002590 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2591 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002592
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002593C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002594-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002595
2596- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2597 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002598
2599----
2600
2601**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**