blob: ec30734f30d8129f93526fdece387e524bb983f2 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +00007What's New in Python 2.5 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2006*
11
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000012Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Michael W. Hudson774479c2005-04-18 08:46:17 +000015- It is now safe to call PyGILState_Release() before
16 PyEval_InitThreads() (note that if there is reason to believe there
17 are multiple threads around you still must call PyEval_InitThreads()
18 before using the Python API; this fix is for extension modules that
19 have no way of knowing if Python is multi-threaded yet).
20
Michael W. Hudsone3afc592005-04-07 10:11:19 +000021- Typing Ctrl-C whilst raw_input() was waiting in a build with threads
22 disabled caused a crash.
23
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000024- Bug #1165306: instancemethod_new allowed the creation of a method
25 with im_class == im_self == NULL, which caused a crash when called.
26
Anthony Baxter12b6f6c2005-03-29 13:36:16 +000027- Move exception finalisation later in the shutdown process - this
28 fixes the crash seen in bug #1165761
29
Raymond Hettinger96229b12005-03-11 06:49:40 +000030- Added two new builtins, any() and all().
31
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000032- Defining a class with empty parentheses is now allowed
Brett Cannonf4189912005-04-09 02:30:16 +000033 (e.g., ``class C(): pass`` is no longer a syntax error).
34 Patch #1176012 added support to the 'parser' module and 'compiler' package
35 (thanks to logistix for that added support).
Brett Cannon409d8f22005-03-05 06:47:57 +000036
Martin v. Löwis96d743e2005-03-03 23:00:26 +000037- Patch #1115086: Support PY_LONGLONG in structmember.
38
Raymond Hettingerb67cc802005-03-03 16:45:19 +000039- Bug #1155938: new style classes did not check that __init__() was
40 returning None.
41
Martin v. Löwis4bf108d2005-03-03 11:45:45 +000042- Patch #802188: Report characters after line continuation character
43 ('\') with a specific error message.
44
Martin v. Löwisff232d72005-03-03 09:24:38 +000045- Bug #723201: Raise a TypeError for passing bad objects to 'L' format.
46
Michael W. Hudson8e1afab2005-02-17 14:55:21 +000047- Bug #1124295: the __name__ attribute of file objects was
48 inadvertently made inaccessible in restricted mode.
49
Martin v. Löwis13a1fde2005-01-27 18:56:16 +000050- Bug #1074011: closing sys.std{out,err} now causes a flush() and
Martin v. Löwis8e3ca8a2005-01-23 09:41:49 +000051 an ferror() call.
52
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +000053- min() and max() now support key= arguments with the same meaning as in
54 list.sort().
55
Raymond Hettingerc34f8672005-01-02 06:17:33 +000056- The peephole optimizer now performs simple constant folding in expressions:
57 (2+3) --> (5).
58
Raymond Hettingera422c342005-01-11 03:03:27 +000059- set and frozenset objects can now be marshalled. SF #1098985.
60
Michael W. Hudsonfaa76482005-01-31 17:09:25 +000061- Bug #1077106: Poor argument checking could cause memory corruption
62 in calls to os.read().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000063
Jeremy Hyltonab630502005-02-04 18:44:06 +000064- The parser did not complain about future statements in illegal
65 positions. It once again reports a syntax error if a future
66 statement occurs after anything other than a doc string.
67
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +000068Extension Modules
69-----------------
70
Michael W. Hudsonb330adf2005-03-31 09:35:44 +000071- Bug #1166660: The readline module could segfault if hook functions
72 were set in a different thread than that which called readline.
73
Raymond Hettinger4aec61e2005-03-18 21:20:23 +000074- collections.deque objects now support a remove() method.
75
Raymond Hettinger984f9bb2005-03-09 16:38:48 +000076- operator.itemgetter() and operator.attrgetter() now support retrieving
77 multiple fields. This provides direct support for sorting on multiple
78 keys (primary, secondary, etc).
79
Martin v. Löwisb60ae992005-03-08 09:10:29 +000080- os.access now supports Unicode path names on non-Win32 systems.
81
Martin v. Löwisfd78a6f2005-03-04 14:37:01 +000082- Patches #925152, #1118602: Avoid reading after the end of the buffer
83 in pyexpat.GetInputContext.
84
Martin v. Löwis7fe60c02005-03-03 11:22:44 +000085- Patches #749830, #1144555: allow UNIX mmap size to default to current
86 file size.
87
Raymond Hettinger9c323f82005-02-28 19:39:44 +000088- Added functional.partial(). See PEP309.
89
Martin v. Löwis9533e342005-02-27 20:33:25 +000090- Patch #1093585: raise a ValueError for negative history items in readline.
91 {remove_history,replace_history}
92
Fred Drake9c131f22005-01-23 15:16:08 +000093- The spwd module has been added, allowing access to the shadow password
94 database.
Martin v. Löwisc3001752005-01-23 09:27:24 +000095
Martin v. Löwisfe33d0b2005-01-16 08:57:39 +000096- stat_float_times is now True.
97
Raymond Hettingerb0900e62004-12-16 16:23:40 +000098- array.array objects are now picklable.
99
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000100- the cPickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
101 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
102
Raymond Hettingerb2594052004-12-05 09:25:51 +0000103- itertools.islice() now accepts None for the start and step arguments.
104 This allows islice() to work more readily with slices:
105 islice(s.start, s.stop, s.step)
106
Skip Montanaro0af3ade2005-01-13 04:12:31 +0000107- datetime.datetime() now has a strptime class method which can be used to
108 create datetime object using a string and format.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000109
110Library
111-------
112
Martin v. Löwis55f1bb82005-03-21 20:56:35 +0000113- distutils.commands.upload was added to support uploading distribution
114 files to PyPI.
115
Walter Dörwalda6e8a4a2005-03-31 13:57:38 +0000116- distutils.commands.register now encodes the data as UTF-8 before posting
117 them to PyPI.
118
Raymond Hettinger267b8682005-03-27 10:47:39 +0000119- decimal operator and comparison methods now return NotImplemented
120 instead of raising a TypeError when interacting with other types. This
121 allows other classes to implement __radd__ style methods and have them
122 work as expected.
123
Raymond Hettingerbea3f6f2005-03-15 04:59:17 +0000124- Bug #1163325: Decimal infinities failed to hash. Attempting to
125 hash a NaN raised an InvalidOperation instead of a TypeError.
126
Martin v. Löwis78be7df2005-03-05 12:47:42 +0000127- Patch #918101: Add tarfile open mode r|* for auto-detection of the
128 stream compression; add, for symmetry reasons, r:* as a synonym of r.
129
Martin v. Löwis00a73e72005-03-04 19:40:34 +0000130- Patch #1043890: Add extractall method to tarfile.
131
Martin v. Löwisc72dd382005-03-04 13:50:17 +0000132- Patch #1075887: Don't require MSVC in distutils if there is nothing
133 to build.
134
Martin v. Löwis637431b2005-03-03 23:12:42 +0000135- Patch #1103407: Properly deal with tarfile iterators when untarring
136 symbolic links on Windows.
137
Martin v. Löwisa4dac402005-03-03 11:39:45 +0000138- Patch #645894: Use getrusage for computing the time consumption in
139 profile.py if available.
140
Martin v. Löwisdf37c8c2005-03-03 11:08:03 +0000141- Patch #1046831: Use get_python_version where appropriate in sysconfig.py.
142
Martin v. Löwisc5574e82005-03-03 10:57:37 +0000143- Patch #1117454: Remove code to special-case cookies without values
144 in LWPCookieJar.
145
Martin v. Löwis4ea3ead2005-03-03 10:48:12 +0000146- Patch #1117339: Add cookielib special name tests.
147
Martin v. Löwise869eb12005-03-03 09:46:07 +0000148- Patch #1112812: Make bsddb/__init__.py more friendly for modulefinder.
149
Martin v. Löwisf2a8d632005-03-03 08:35:22 +0000150- Patch #1110248: SYNC_FLUSH the zlib buffer for GZipFile.flush.
151
Martin v. Löwisdf241532005-03-03 08:17:42 +0000152- Patch #1107973: Allow to iterate over the lines of a tarfile.ExFileObject.
153
Martin v. Löwis8ed338a2005-03-03 08:12:27 +0000154- Patch #1104111: Alter setup.py --help and --help-commands.
155
Martin v. Löwis4afe1542005-03-01 08:09:28 +0000156- Patch #1121234: Properly cleanup _exit and tkerror commands.
157
Martin v. Löwisc2a0ac22005-02-24 20:22:10 +0000158- Patch #1049151: xdrlib now unpacks booleans as True or False.
159
Raymond Hettingerbab41432005-02-05 01:31:19 +0000160- Fixed bug in a NameError bug in cookielib. Patch #1116583.
161
Guido van Rossumd0641422005-02-03 15:01:24 +0000162- Applied a security fix to SimpleXMLRPCserver (PSF-2005-001). This
163 disables recursive traversal through instance attributes, which can
164 be exploited in various ways.
165
Martin v. Löwis1d11de62005-01-29 13:29:23 +0000166- Bug #1110478: Revert os.environ.update to do putenv again.
167
Thomas Hellerd6c6e222005-01-20 19:20:16 +0000168- Bug #1103844: fix distutils.install.dump_dirs() with negated options.
169
Martin v. Löwis22b457e2005-01-16 08:40:58 +0000170- os.{SEEK_SET, SEEK_CUR, SEEK_END} have been added for convenience.
171
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000172- Enhancements to the csv module:
173
174 + Dialects are now validated by the underlying C code, better
175 reflecting it's capabilities, and improving it's compliance with
176 PEP 305.
177 + Dialect parameter parsing has been re-implemented to improve error
178 reporting.
179 + quotechar=None and quoting=QUOTE_NONE now work the way PEP 305
180 dictates.
181 + the parser now removes the escapechar prefix from escaped characters.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000182 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the writer now tests for numeric
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000183 types, rather than any object than can be represented as a numeric.
Andrew McNamara0f0599d2005-01-12 09:45:18 +0000184 + when quoting=QUOTE_NONNUMERIC, the reader now casts unquoted fields
185 to floats.
Andrew McNamaraf69d94f2005-01-13 11:30:54 +0000186 + reader now allows \r characters to be quoted (previously it only allowed
187 \n to be quoted).
Andrew McNamarac89f2842005-01-12 07:44:42 +0000188 + writer doublequote handling improved.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000189 + Dialect classes passed to the module are no longer instantiated by
190 the module before being parsed (the former validation scheme required
191 this, but the mechanism was unreliable).
192 + The dialect registry now contains instances of the internal
193 C-coded dialect type, rather than references to python objects.
194 + the internal c-coded dialect type is now immutable.
195 + register_dialect now accepts the same keyword dialect specifications
196 as the reader and writer, allowing the user to register dialects
197 without first creating a dialect class.
198 + a configurable limit to the size of parsed fields has been added -
199 previously, an unmatched quote character could result in the entire
200 file being read into the field buffer before an error was reported.
Andrew McNamara31d88962005-01-12 03:45:10 +0000201 + A new module method csv.field_size_limit() has been added that sets
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000202 the parser field size limit (returning the former limit). The initial
203 limit is 128kB.
Andrew McNamara7f2053e2005-01-12 11:17:16 +0000204 + A line_num attribute has been added to the reader object, which tracks
205 the number of lines read from the source iterator. This is not
206 the same as the number of records returned, as records can span
207 multiple lines.
Andrew McNamaraa08eecb2005-01-12 03:25:27 +0000208 + reader and writer objects were not being registered with the cyclic-GC.
209 This has been fixed.
210
Brett Cannone6539c42005-01-08 02:43:53 +0000211- _DummyThread objects in the threading module now delete self.__block that is
212 inherited from _Thread since it uses up a lock allocated by 'thread'. The
213 lock primitives tend to be limited in number and thus should not be wasted on
214 a _DummyThread object. Fixes bug #1089632.
215
Raymond Hettinger97db05d2005-01-07 08:15:41 +0000216- The imghdr module now detects Exif files.
217
Raymond Hettinger6065d322004-12-20 23:51:53 +0000218- StringIO.truncate() now correctly adjusts the size attribute.
219 (Bug #951915).
220
Marc-André Lemburgbb4f1bd2004-12-10 21:58:14 +0000221- locale.py now uses an updated locale alias table (built using
222 Tools/i18n/makelocalealias.py, a tool to parse the X11 locale
223 alias file); the encoding lookup was enhanced to use Python's
224 encoding alias table
225
Raymond Hettinger3557f422004-12-07 12:02:02 +0000226- moved deprecated modules to Lib/lib-old: whrandom, tzparse, statcache.
227
Raymond Hettingera6b45cc2004-12-07 07:05:57 +0000228- the pickle module no longer accepts the deprecated None option in the
229 args tuple returned by __reduce__().
230
Brett Cannon84667c02004-12-07 03:25:18 +0000231- optparse now optionally imports gettext. This allows its use in setup.py.
232
Raymond Hettinger3489cad2004-12-05 05:20:42 +0000233- the pickle module no longer uses the deprecated bin parameter.
234
Raymond Hettinger1bc82f82004-12-05 03:58:17 +0000235- the shelve module no longer uses the deprecated binary parameter.
236
Raymond Hettinger6c92d762004-12-05 03:28:00 +0000237- the pstats module no longer uses the deprecated ignore() method.
238
Raymond Hettingerf3fa9462004-12-05 01:58:09 +0000239- the filecmp module no longer uses the deprecated use_statcache argument.
240
Raymond Hettinger664347b2004-12-04 21:21:53 +0000241- unittest.TestCase.run() and unittest.TestSuite.run() can now be successfully
242 extended or overridden by subclasses. Formerly, the subclassed method would
243 be ignored by the rest of the module. (Bug #1078905).
244
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000245- heapq.nsmallest() and heapq.nlargest() now support key= arguments with
Raymond Hettinger3b0c7c22004-12-03 08:30:39 +0000246 the same meaning as in list.sort().
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000247
Walter Dörwald36733692004-12-22 12:50:50 +0000248- Bug #1076985: ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` now calls ``read()`` only
249 once when a size argument is given. This prevents a buffer overflow in the
250 tokenizer with very long source lines.
251
Andrew M. Kuchling3b585b32004-12-28 20:10:48 +0000252- Bug #1083110: ``zlib.decompress.flush()`` would segfault if called immediately
253 after creating the object, without any intervening ``.decompress()`` calls.
254
Skip Montanaro05885812005-01-16 20:48:27 +0000255- The reconvert.quote function can now emit triple-quoted strings. The
256 reconvert module now has some simple documentation.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000257
Walter Dörwaldaf3b39a2005-02-18 13:22:43 +0000258- ``UserString.MutableString`` now supports negative indices in
259 ``__setitem__`` and ``__delitem__``
260
Greg Ward40407942005-03-05 02:53:17 +0000261- Bug #1149508: ``textwrap`` now handles hyphenated numbers (eg. "2004-03-05")
262 correctly.
263
264
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000265Build
266-----
267
Bob Ippolitoed233462005-03-29 13:47:59 +0000268- SF patch 1171735: Darwin 8's headers are anal about POSIX compliance,
269 and linking has changed (prebinding is now deprecated, and libcc_dynamic
270 no longer exists). This configure patch makes things right.
271
Martin v. Löwise2713be2005-03-08 15:03:08 +0000272- Bug #1158607: Build with --disable-unicode again.
273
Brett Cannon46d96232005-02-16 00:07:19 +0000274- spwdmodule.c is built only if either HAVE_GETSPNAM or HAVE_HAVE_GETSPENT is
275 defined. Discovered as a result of not being able to build on OS X.
276
Brett Cannon516592f2004-12-07 00:42:59 +0000277- setup.py now uses the directories specified in LDFLAGS using the -L option
278 and in CPPFLAGS using the -I option for adding library and include
279 directories, respectively, for compiling extension modules against. This has
280 led to the core being compiled using the values in CPPFLAGS. It also removes
281 the need for the special-casing of both DarwinPorts and Fink for darwin since
282 the proper directories can be specified in LDFLAGS (``-L/sw/lib`` for Fink,
283 ``-L/opt/local/lib`` for DarwinPorts) and CPPFLAGS (``-I/sw/include`` for
284 Fink, ``-I/opt/local/include`` for DarwinPorts).
285
Brett Cannon43802422005-02-10 20:48:03 +0000286- Test in configure.in that checks for tzset no longer dependent on tm->tm_zone
287 to exist in the struct (not required by either ISO C nor the UNIX 2 spec).
288 Tests for sanity in tzname when HAVE_TZNAME defined were also defined.
289 Closes bug #1096244. Thanks Gregory Bond.
290
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000291
292C API
293-----
294
Raymond Hettinger66517482004-12-03 11:45:13 +0000295- Removed PyRange_New().
296
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000297
298Tests
299-----
300
Martin v. Löwis4d394df2005-01-23 09:19:22 +0000301- In test_os, st_?time is now truncated before comparing it with ST_?TIME.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000302
Brett Cannonced04e02005-02-13 22:53:22 +0000303
304Documentation
305-------------
306
307- Remove all latent references for "Macintosh" that referred to semantics for
308 Mac OS 9 and change to reflect the state for OS X.
309 Closes patch #1095802. Thanks Jack Jansen.
310
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000311Mac
312---
313
314
315
316Tools/Demos
317-----------
318
Martin v. Löwisab9ec162005-04-09 10:53:34 +0000319- Patch #1177597: Correct Complex.__init__.
Raymond Hettinger4901a1f2004-12-02 08:59:14 +0000320
321
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000322What's New in Python 2.4 final?
323===============================
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000324
Anthony Baxtere2648ee2004-11-30 01:28:55 +0000325*Release date: 30-NOV-2004*
Kurt B. Kaiser4c79a832004-11-23 18:06:08 +0000326
327Core and builtins
328-----------------
329
330- Bug 875692: Improve signal handling, especially when using threads, by
331 forcing an early re-execution of PyEval_EvalFrame() "periodic" code when
332 things_to_do is not cleared by Py_MakePendingCalls().
333
334
Anthony Baxter4277ed82004-11-30 11:53:10 +0000335What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1)
336==============================================
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000337
Anthony Baxter5cc727a2004-11-18 12:32:27 +0000338*Release date: 18-NOV-2004*
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000339
340Core and builtins
341-----------------
342
Tim Petersfb1ffb02004-11-08 04:30:21 +0000343- Bug 1061968: Fixes in 2.4a3 to address thread bug 1010677 reintroduced
344 the years-old thread shutdown race bug 225673. Numeric history lesson
345 aside, all bugs in all three reports are fixed now.
346
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000347
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000348Library
349-------
350
351- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
352 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
353 raised is re-raised.
354
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000355- ``doctest``'s new support for adding ``pdb.set_trace()`` calls to
356 doctests was broken in a dramatic but shallow way. Fixed.
357
Tim Petersbbc0d442004-11-13 16:18:32 +0000358- Bug 1065388: ``calendar``'s ``day_name``, ``day_abbr``, ``month_name``,
359 and ``month_abbr`` attributes emulate sequences of locale-correct
360 spellings of month and day names. Because the locale can change at
361 any time, the correct spelling is recomputed whenever one of these is
362 indexed. In the worst case, the index may be a slice object, so these
363 recomputed every day or month name each time they were indexed. This is
364 much slower than necessary in the usual case, when the index is just an
365 integer. In that case, only the single spelling needed is recomputed
366 now; and, when the index is a slice object, only the spellings needed
367 by the slice are recomputed now.
368
Tim Peters50c6bdb2004-11-08 22:07:37 +0000369- Patch 1061679: Added ``__all__`` to pickletools.py.
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +0000370
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000371Build
372-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +0000373
Brett Cannon7d28e962004-11-07 01:19:00 +0000374- Bug 1034277 / Patch 1035255: Remove compilation of core against CoreServices
375 and CoreFoundation on OS X. Involved removing PyMac_GetAppletScriptFile()
376 which has no known users. Thanks Bob Ippolito.
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000377
378C API
379-----
380
Raymond Hettinger39e92ea2004-11-18 09:41:45 +0000381- The PyRange_New() function is deprecated.
382
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +0000383
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000384What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
385================================
386
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +0000387*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000388
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000389License
390-------
391
392The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
393is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
394changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
395Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
396intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
397durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
398the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
399License::
400
401 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
402
403says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
404to Python 2.1.1.
405
406The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
407License Version 2.
408
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000409Core and builtins
410-----------------
411
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000412- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
413 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
414 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
415 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
416 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
417 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
418 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
419 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
420 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
421 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
422
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000423- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000424
425Extension Modules
426-----------------
427
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000428- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
429 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
430 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
431 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000432
433Library
434-------
435
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000436- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
437 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
438 returned.
439
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000440- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
441
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000442- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
443 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
444
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000445- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
446
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000447- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
448 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000449
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000450- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
451
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000452- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
453
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000454- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000455 the source code is updated and reloaded.
456
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000457Build
458-----
459
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000460- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000461
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000462What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
463================================
464
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000465*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000466
467Core and builtins
468-----------------
469
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000470- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000471 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
472
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000473- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
474 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
475 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
476 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
477
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000478- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
479 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
480
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000481- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
482 constant.
483
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000484- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
485 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
486 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
487 large), and to anomalies such as
488 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
489 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
490 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
491 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000492
493Extension modules
494-----------------
495
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000496- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
497 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000498 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
499 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
500 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000501
502Library
503-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000504
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000505- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000506 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000507 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
508 --swig-cpp.
509
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000510- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
511 it is set.
512
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000513- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000514
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000515- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
516 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
517 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
518 Closes bug #1039270.
519
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000520- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000521
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000522 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000523 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
524 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
525 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
526 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
527 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
528 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
529 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
530 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
531 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
532 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
533 + Updates to documentation.
534
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000535- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
536 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
537 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
538 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
539
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000540- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000541
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000542- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
543 applications should use the getmember function.
544
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000545- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
546
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000547- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
548 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
549 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
550 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
551 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
552 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
553 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
554 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
555 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
556
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000557- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
558 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000559 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000560
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000561- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
562 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
563 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
564 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
565 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
566 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
567 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
568 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000569
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000570- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
571 the new public features (of which there are many).
572
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000573- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000574 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
575 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
576 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
577 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000578 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000579
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000580- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
581
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000582- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
583 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
584 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
585 options.
586
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000587- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
588 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
589 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
590 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
591 conditions under which non-string values work.
592
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000593Build
594-----
595
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000596- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
597 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
598 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
599
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000600- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
601 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
602 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
603 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
604 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000605
606C API
607-----
608
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000609- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
610 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
611
612- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
613
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000614- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
615 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
616 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
617 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
618 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
619 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
620 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
621 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
622 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
623
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000624- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
625
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000626- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
627 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
628 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000629
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000630Tests
631-----
632
633- test__locale ported to unittest
634
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000635Mac
636---
637
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000638- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
639 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
640 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000641
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000642Tools/Demos
643-----------
644
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000645- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
646 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
647 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
648 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
649 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000650
651
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000652What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
653=================================
654
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000655*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000656
657Core and builtins
658-----------------
659
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000660- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000661 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
662
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000663- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
664 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
665 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
666 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
667 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
668 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
669 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
670 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000671 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
672 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
673 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
674 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
675 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000676
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000677- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
678 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
679 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
680 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
681 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
682
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000683- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
684
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000685- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
686 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
687
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000688- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
689 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
690 modified the list.
691
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000692- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
693 functions is now writable.
694
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000695- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
696 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
697 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
698 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
699
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000700- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
701 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
702 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
703 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
704 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000705
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000706- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
707 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
708
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000709Extension modules
710-----------------
711
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000712- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
713
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000714- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
715 data.
716
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000717- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
718 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
719 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
720 supposed to have been truncated away.
721
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000722- Added socket.socketpair().
723
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000724- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
725 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
726
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000727- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000728 versions of Python, have now been removed.
729
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000730Library
731-------
732
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000733- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000734 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000735
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000736- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
737 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
738
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000739- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
740 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
741
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000742- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
743
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000744- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
745 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000746
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000747- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
748 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
749
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000750- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
751
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000752- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
753
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000754- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
755
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000756- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
757 Percivall.
758
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000759- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
760 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
761
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000762- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
763 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
764 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000765 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000766
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000767- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
768 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
769 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
770 and exponent.
771
772- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
773
774- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
775 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
776 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
777
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000778- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
779 to the readline module.
780
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000781- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000782 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
783 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000784
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000785- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
786 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
787 contains symlinks.
788
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000789- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
790 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
791
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000792- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
793 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
794 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
795
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000796- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
797 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
798 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
799 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
800 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
801 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
802 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
803 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
804 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
805 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
806 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
807 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
808 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
809
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000810- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
811
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000812Tools/Demos
813-----------
814
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000815- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
816 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
817
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000818- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
819
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000820Build
821-----
822
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000823- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
824 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
825 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
826 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
827 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
828 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
829 plans to do so.
830
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000831- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
832 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
833
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000834- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
835 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
836
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000837- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
838 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
839
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000840- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
841 GNU/k*BSD systems.
842
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000843- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
844 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
845
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000846C API
847-----
848
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000849..
850
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000851Documentation
852-------------
853
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000854- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
855 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
856
857- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
858 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
859 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000860
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000861New platforms
862-------------
863
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000864- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
865
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000866Tests
867-----
868
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000869..
870
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000871Windows
872-------
873
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000874- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
875 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
876 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
877 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
878 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
879 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
880 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
881 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
882 the problem.
883
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000884Mac
885---
886
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000887..
888
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000889
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000890What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
891=================================
892
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000893*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000894
895Core and builtins
896-----------------
897
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000898- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
899 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
900 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
901 sensitive code.
902
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000903- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000904 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000905
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000906 @staticmethod
907 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000908
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000909 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000910
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000911- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
912 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
913 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
914 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
915 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
916 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
917 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
918 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
919 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
920 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
921 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
922
923 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
924 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
925 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
926 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
927 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
928 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
929 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
930
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000931- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
932 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
933
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000934- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000935 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000936
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000937- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000938 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000939 which was missing for no apparent reason.
940
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000941- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000942 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
943 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
944
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000945- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
946 types that support garbage collection.
947
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000948- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
949
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000950- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
951 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
952 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
953 Jython.
954
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000955- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
956
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000957- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
958 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
959
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000960- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
961 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
962 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000963
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000964- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
965 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
966 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
967
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000968Extension modules
969-----------------
970
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000971- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
972
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000973Library
974-------
975
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000976- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
977 TIS-620
978
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000979- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
980 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
981 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
982 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
983 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
984 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
985 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
986 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
987 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
988 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
989
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000990- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
991
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000992- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
993 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
994 same as when the argument is omitted).
995 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
996
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000997- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
998
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000999- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
1000 schemes are offered.
1001
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +00001002- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
1003
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +00001004- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
1005 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
1006 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
1007
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +00001008- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
1009
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +00001010- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
1011 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
1012
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +00001013- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
1014 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
1015 when dummy_threading is being used.
1016
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +00001017- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
1018 from a tarfile.
1019
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001020- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001021 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +00001022
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +00001023- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
1024 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
1025 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
1026 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
1027
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +00001028- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
1029 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
1030
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +00001031- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
1032 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
1033 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
1034 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
1035 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
1036 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
1037 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
1038 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
1039 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
1040 by some other method in progress).
1041
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001042- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
1043 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
1044 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +00001045
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +00001046- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
1047
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +00001048- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
1049 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
1050 AM Kuchling.
1051
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +00001052- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
1053 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
1054 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
1055
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +00001056- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
1057 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
1058 instead of unsigned.
1059
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001060- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +00001061 no longer part of the public API.
1062
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +00001063- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
1064 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
1065 string methods of the same name).
1066
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001067- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +00001068 SF patch 945642.
1069
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001070- doctest unittest integration improvements:
1071
1072 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
1073
1074 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
1075 DocTestSuites.
1076
1077- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
1078 that provide thread-local data.
1079
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001080- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
1081 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
1082
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +00001083- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
1084
1085- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
1086 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
1087 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
1088
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001089- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
1090
1091 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
1092 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
1093 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001094
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +00001095 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
1096 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
1097 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
1098 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
1099
1100 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
1101 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
1102
1103 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
1104 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
1105 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
1106 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
1107
1108 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
1109 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
1110 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
1111 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
1112 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
1113
1114 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
1115 wrapping help output.
1116
1117 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
1118 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
1119 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +00001120
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001121C API
1122-----
1123
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +00001124- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
1125 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
1126 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
1127 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
1128 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
1129 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
1130 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
1131 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
1132 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
1133 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
1134 its visible semantics have not changed.
1135
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001136- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
1137 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
1138
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001139Documentation
1140-------------
1141
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001142- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001143
1144 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +00001145 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001146
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +00001147 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001148
1149 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
1150
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +00001151- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +00001152
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001153Tests
1154-----
1155
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001156- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +00001157 platforms that use the Makefile.
1158
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +00001159- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
1160 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
1161 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
1162
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00001163
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001164What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
1165=================================
1166
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +00001167*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001168
1169Core and builtins
1170-----------------
1171
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +00001172- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
1173 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
1174 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
1175 objects now (one object instead of three).
1176
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +00001177- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
1178 Windows DLLs.
1179
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +00001180- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
1181 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +00001182
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +00001183- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
1184 a new .pyc magic.
1185
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +00001186- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
1187 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
1188 be there.
1189
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +00001190- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
1191 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
1192 the LC_NUMERIC category.
1193
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +00001194- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
1195 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
1196 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
1197
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +00001198- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
1199
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +00001200- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
1201 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
1202 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +00001203
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +00001204- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
1205 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
1206
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +00001207- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
1208
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001209- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001210 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +00001211
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +00001212- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
1213
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +00001214- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
1215
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +00001216- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
1217 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
1218
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +00001219- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
1220 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
1221 Fixes bug #858016 .
1222
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +00001223- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
1224 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
1225 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
1226
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +00001227- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
1228 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
1229 improves their performance (about 35%).
1230
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +00001231- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
1232 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
1233 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
1234
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +00001235- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
1236 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
1237 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
1238 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
1239
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001240- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
1241 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
Walter Dörwald09515af2005-03-18 10:28:24 +00001242 list comprehensions, and the list constructor (when the input iterable
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001243 length is not known).
1244
1245- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
1246 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +00001247 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
1248 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +00001249 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
1250
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +00001251- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
1252 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
1253
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +00001254- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
1255 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
1256 keyword arguments.
1257
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +00001258- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
1259 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
1260 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
1261
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +00001262- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
1263 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
1264 cases.
1265
1266- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
1267 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
1268 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
1269 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
1270 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
1271 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
1272 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
1273 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
1274 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
1275 a release build.
1276
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +00001277- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
1278 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
1279
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001280- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001281 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +00001282
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +00001283- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
1284 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
1285 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
1286 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
1287 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
1288 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
1289 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
1290 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
1291 destroyed.
1292
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +00001293- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
1294 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
1295 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
1296 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
1297 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
1298 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
1299 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
1300 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
1301
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +00001302- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
1303 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
1304 character other than a space.
1305
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +00001306- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
1307 by the function object or by the method object, the function
1308 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
1309 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
1310 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
1311 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1312 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1313 attributes with the same name.
1314
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001315- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1316 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1317 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1318 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1319 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1320 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1321 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1322 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1323 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1324 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1325 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1326 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1327 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1328 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001329
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001330- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1331 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1332 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1333 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1334 This has been repaired.
1335
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001336- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1337
1338- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1339
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001340- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1341 over a sequence.
1342
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001343- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001344 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001345
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001346- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1347
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001348- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1349 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1350 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1351 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1352 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1353 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1354 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1355 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1356
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001357- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1358 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1359 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1360
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001361- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1362 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1363 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1364 freelist.
1365
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001366- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1367 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1368
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001369- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1370 number.
1371
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001372- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1373 a TypeError exception.
1374
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001375- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1376 820195.
1377
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001378- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1379 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1380 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1381
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001382- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001383 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1384 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001385
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001386- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1387 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1388 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1389
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001390- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1391 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001392 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001393
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001394- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001395 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1396 the first call.
1397
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001398
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001399Extension modules
1400-----------------
1401
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001402- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1403 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1404
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001405- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1406 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1407 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1408 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1409 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1410 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1411 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001412
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001413- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1414
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001415- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1416
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001417- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1418 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1419
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001420- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1421 fewer false positives.
1422
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001423- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1424 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1425
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001426- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001427 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1428
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001429- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001430 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001431 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001432 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1433 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001434
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001435- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1436 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1437 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1438 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1439
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001440- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1441 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1442 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1443 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1444 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1445 #897625.
1446
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001447- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1448 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1449
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001450- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1451 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1452 and pops on either side of the deque.
1453
1454- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1455 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1456
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001457- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1458 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1459 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1460 other functions that expect a function argument.
1461
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001462- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1463
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001464- os.getsid was added.
1465
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001466- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1467 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1468 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1469
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001470- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1471
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001472- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1473
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001474- readline.clear_history was added.
1475
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001476- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1477
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001478- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1479
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001480- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1481
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001482- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1483
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001484- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1485
1486- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1487
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001488- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1489
1490- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1491
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001492- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1493 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1494 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1495
1496- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1497 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1498 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1499 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1500 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1501 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1502 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1503
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001504- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1505 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1506 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1507 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001508
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001509- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001510 iterators from a single iterable.
1511
1512- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1513 of raising a TypeError exception.
1514
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001515- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1516 as parameter.
1517
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001518Library
1519-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001520
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001521- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1522 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1523 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001524
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001525- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1526 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1527 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001528
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001529- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001530
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001531- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1532 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001533
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001534- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1535 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1536
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001537- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1538
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001539- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001540 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001541
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001542- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001543 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001544
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001545- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1546
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001547- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1548 on cygwin and mingw32.
1549
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001550- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1551
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001552- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1553 module.
1554
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001555- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1556 installation scheme for all platforms.
1557
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001558- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001559 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001560
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001561- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1562 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1563 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1564
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001565- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1566 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1567 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1568
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001569- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1570
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001571- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1572
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001573- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1574 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1575
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001576- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1577 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1578 type pattern with the same value exists.
1579
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001580- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1581 when run from the command prompt).
1582
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001583- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1584 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1585
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001586- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1587 default sort).
1588
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001589- Added global runctx function to profile module
1590
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001591- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1592
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001593- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1594
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001595- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1596
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001597- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001598 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1599 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1600 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1601 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1602 accordingly.
1603
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001604- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1605 decoding standards.
1606
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001607- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1608 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1609 called for all requests.
1610
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001611- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1612 they are passed to the compiler.
1613
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001614- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1615 indent, width and depth.
1616
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001617- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1618 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1619
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001620- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1621 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1622
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001623- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1624
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001625- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1626
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001627- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1628
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001629- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1630 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1631
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001632- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001633 for better performance.
1634
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001635- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001636
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001637- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1638 a string).
1639
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001640- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1641
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001642- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1643
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001644- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1645
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001646- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1647
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001648- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1649 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1650 list of fieldnames.
1651
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001652- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1653 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1654
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001655- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1656
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001657- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1658 empty lists.
1659
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001660- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1661 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1662 and shelves.
1663
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001664- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1665 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1666
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001667- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001668 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1669 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001670
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001671- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1672 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001673 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001674
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001675- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001676 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1677 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1678
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001679- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1680 and removed in Py2.4.
1681
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001682- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1683
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001684- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1685
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001686Tools/Demos
1687-----------
1688
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001689- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1690 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1691
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001692- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1693
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001694- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1695 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1696 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1697 destination in situations where both files are given.
1698
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001699- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1700 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1701 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1702 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1703
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001704- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1705
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001706- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1707 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1708 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1709 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1710 now.
1711
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001712- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1713 in effect
1714
1715- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1716 C-c C-h
1717
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001718- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1719 -d option was given.
1720
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001721Build
1722-----
1723
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001724- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1725 build under OS X.
1726
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001727- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1728 --enable-profiling.
1729
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001730- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1731 is configured --with-tsc.
1732
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001733- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1734 on AMD64.
1735
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001736- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1737 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1738
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001739- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1740 removed.
1741
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001742- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1743 supported (see PEP 11).
1744
1745- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1746
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001747- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1748
1749- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1750 (see PEP 11).
1751
1752- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1753 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1754
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001755C API
1756-----
1757
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001758- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1759 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1760 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1761
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001762- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1763 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1764 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1765 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1766
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001767- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1768 generator objects.
1769
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001770- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1771 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001772 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1773 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001774
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001775- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1776 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1777
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001778- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1779 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1780 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1781 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1782 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1783
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001784- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1785 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1786 about 10% faster.
1787
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001788- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1789 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1790
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001791- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1792 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1793 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1794 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1795
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001796Windows
1797-------
1798
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001799- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1800 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1801 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1802 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1803
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001804- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1805 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1806 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1807
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001808
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001809What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1810===============================
1811
1812*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1813
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001814IDLE
1815----
1816
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001817- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1818 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1819 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1820 context-menu actions.
1821
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001822- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1823 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1824 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1825 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1826 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1827 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1828 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1829 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1830 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1831
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001832
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001833What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1834=============================================
1835
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001836*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001837
1838Core and builtins
1839-----------------
1840
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001841- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001842 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001843 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1844
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001845Extension modules
1846-----------------
1847
1848- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1849 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1850 than once. This has been fixed.
1851
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001852- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1853 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1854 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1855 call.
1856
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001857- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1858
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001859Library
1860-------
1861
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001862- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1863 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1864
1865- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1866 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1867 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1868 restored.
1869
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001870IDLE
1871----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001872
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001873- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001874
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001875Build
1876-----
1877
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001878- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1879 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1880
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001881C API
1882-----
1883
1884Windows
1885-------
1886
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001887- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1888 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1889
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001890- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1891
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001892Mac
1893---
1894
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001895- Various fixes to pimp.
1896
1897- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1898
1899- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1900 more problems than it solves.
1901
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001902
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001903What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1904=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001905
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001906*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1907
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001908Core and builtins
1909-----------------
1910
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001911- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1912 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1913
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001914- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1915 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001916 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001917
1918- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1919 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1920 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001921 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001922
1923- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1924 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001925
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001926- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1927 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1928 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1929
1930- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001931 770247.
1932
1933- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001934
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001935Extension modules
1936-----------------
1937
1938- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1939 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1940
1941- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1942
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001943- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1944
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001945- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1946 contained within the _strptime module.
1947
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001948- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1949 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1950
1951- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001952 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1953
1954- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1955 the find_class attribute, if present.
1956
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001957- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001958
1959 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1960 (SF bug 763298).
1961
1962 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001963 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1964 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1965 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001966
1967 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1968
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001969Library
1970-------
1971
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001972- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1973
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001974- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1975 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1976 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1977 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1978 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1979 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1980 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1981 or Tester().
1982
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001983- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1984 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1985 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1986 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1987 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1988 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1989 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1990 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1991 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001992
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001993 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001994
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001995- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1996 weren't before was an oversight.
1997
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001998- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1999 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
2000
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00002001- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
2002 when there are no lines.
2003
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00002004- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
2005 which could occur with Tk 8.4
2006
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002007- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
2008 to child processes.
2009
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002010- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
2011
2012- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
2013
2014- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
2015 xmlrpclib.
2016
2017- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
2018 responses.
2019
2020- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
2021 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
2022
2023- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
2024 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
2025 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
2026
2027- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
2028 used as patterns.
2029
2030- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
2031 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
2032 than Tk 8.3.
2033
2034- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
2035
2036- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002037
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002038Tools/Demos
2039-----------
2040
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002041- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
2042
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00002043- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
2044
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002045- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002046
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002047Build
2048-----
2049
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002050- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
2051
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002052- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
2053
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002054- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
2055 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002056
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002057- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
2058 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
2059 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00002060
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002061C API
2062-----
2063
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002064- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
2065 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
2066
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002067Windows
2068-------
2069
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002070- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
2071 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
2072 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
2073 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
2074 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
2075 Python exception ::
2076
2077 thread.error: can't start new thread
2078
2079 is raised now.
2080
2081- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
2082 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
2083 instead of from DLL teardown.
2084
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002085Mac
2086---
2087
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002088- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00002089 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00002090 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
2091 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
2092 the executable in the bundle.
2093
2094- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00002095
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00002096- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
2097
2098- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
2099 on Panther.
2100
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002101What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
2102================================
2103
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002104*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002105
2106Core and builtins
2107-----------------
2108
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00002109- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
2110 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
2111 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
2112 with the -i option.
2113
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00002114- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
2115 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
2116
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002117- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
2118 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
2119
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00002120- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
2121 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
2122 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
2123 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
2124 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
2125 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
2126 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
2127 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
2128 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
2129 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
2130 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
2131 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
2132 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00002133
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002134- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
2135 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
2136 embedded in a lambda expression.
2137
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00002138- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
2139 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
2140 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
2141 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
2142 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
2143
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002144- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
2145 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
2146 matches the restriction on classic classes.
2147
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00002148- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
2149 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
2150
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00002151- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
2152 It's writable again.
2153
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002154- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
2155 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
2156 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002157 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00002158
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002159- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
2160 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
2161 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
2162
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002163Extension modules
2164-----------------
2165
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00002166- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
2167 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
2168
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002169- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
2170 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
2171 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
2172 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
2173
2174- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
2175 collection.
2176
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00002177- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
2178 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
2179 unique within a single program run.
2180
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00002181- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
2182 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
2183
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00002184- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
2185 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
2186
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00002187- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
2188 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00002189
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00002190- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
2191
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00002192- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
2193 Fixes SF bug #730685.
2194
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00002195- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
2196 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
2197 for many BSD-derived systems.
2198
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002199
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002200Library
2201-------
2202
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00002203- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
2204 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
2205 primary ones:
2206
2207 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
2208 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
2209 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
2210
2211 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
2212 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
2213 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
2214 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
2215 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
2216 framework features (which doctest lacks).
2217
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00002218- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
2219 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
2220 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
2221 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
2222 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
2223 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
2224 argument.
2225
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002226- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
2227 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
2228 in the archive.
2229
2230- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
2231 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
2232
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00002233- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
2234 569574).
2235
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002236- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
2237 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
2238 no more.
2239
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002240- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
2241 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
2242 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
2243 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
2244 code coverage.
2245
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002246- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
2247 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
2248 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00002249 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
2250 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00002251
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002252- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
2253 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
2254 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00002255 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00002256
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00002257- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
2258
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00002259- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
2260 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
2261 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
2262 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
2263
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00002264- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
2265 handling.
2266
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00002267- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
2268 __doc__ of data descriptors.
2269
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00002270- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
2271 in socket.py.
2272
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00002273- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
2274
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00002275- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
2276 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
2277 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
2278 opener with proxy support.
2279
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002280- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
2281
2282- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
2283
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002284Tools/Demos
2285-----------
2286
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00002287- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
2288
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00002289- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
2290
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00002291- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
2292 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00002293
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00002294- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
2295 files.
2296
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002297Build
2298-----
2299
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002300- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00002301 different root directory.
2302
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002303C API
2304-----
2305
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00002306- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
2307 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
2308 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
2309 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
2310 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
2311 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2312 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2313 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2314 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2315 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2316
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002317- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2318 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2319 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2320 from Python.
2321
2322
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002323New platforms
2324-------------
2325
2326None this time.
2327
2328Tests
2329-----
2330
2331- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2332 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2333
2334Windows
2335-------
2336
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002337- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2338
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002339- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2340 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2341 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2342 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2343 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2344 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2345 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2346 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2347 that's what it's for.
2348
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002349Mac
2350---
2351
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002352- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2353 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2354 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2355 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002356- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2357 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2358- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002359
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002360SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2361------------------------------------
2362
2363430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2364598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2365622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2366661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2367683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2368697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2369713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2370724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2371727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2372729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2373730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2374731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2375732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2376733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2377735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2378740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2379744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2380745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2381747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2382749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2383751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2384753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2385755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2386757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2387760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2388
2389
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002390What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2391================================
2392
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002393*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002394
2395Core and builtins
2396-----------------
2397
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002398- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2399 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2400
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002401- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2402 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2403 and cannot be strings).
2404
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002405- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2406 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2407 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2408 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2409
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002410- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2411 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2412 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2413 Python itself.
2414
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002415- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2416 the referenced object, if it has one.
2417
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002418- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2419 the thread started at
2420 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2421
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002422- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2423 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2424 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2425 placed on a list index.
2426
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002427- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2428 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2429 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2430 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2431
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002432- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2433 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2434 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2435 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2436 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2437 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2438 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2439
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002440- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2441 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2442 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2443 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2444 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2445
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002446- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2447 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002448
2449- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2450 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2451 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2452 #693195.)
2453
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002454- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2455 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002456
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002457- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002458 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002459 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2460 interpreter executions, would fail.
2461
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002462- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002463 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002464 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002465
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002466Extension modules
2467-----------------
2468
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002469- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2470 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2471 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2472 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2473
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002474- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2475 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2476
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002477- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2478 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2479 and Greg Chapman.)
2480
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002481- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2482 recursively.
2483
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002484- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002485 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2486 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2487 leaks.
2488
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002489- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2490
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002491- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2492 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2493 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2494 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2495 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2496 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2497 #705836.
2498
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002499- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002500 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2501
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002502- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2503 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2504 See SF bug #692416.
2505
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002506- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2507 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2508
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002509- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2510 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2511 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002512
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002513- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002514 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2515 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2516
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002517- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2518 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2519 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2520 timeouts to work properly.
2521
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002522Library
2523-------
2524
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002525- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2526 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2527 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2528 future release.
2529
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002530- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2531 for querying platform dependent features.
2532
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002533- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002534
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002535- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2536 pickle protocol versions.
2537
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002538- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2539 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2540 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2541
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002542- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2543
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002544- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2545 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2546 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2547 modules.
2548
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002549- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2550 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2551 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2552
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002553- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2554 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2555
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002556- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2557 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2558 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2559
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002560- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002561 MS Office extensions.
2562
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002563- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2564 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2565
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002566- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2567 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2568
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002569- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2570 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2571 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2572 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2573 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2574 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2575
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002576- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2577 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2578 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002579
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002580- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2581 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2582 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2583
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002584- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2585
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002586- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2587 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2588 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2589
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002590Tools/Demos
2591-----------
2592
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002593- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2594 See the module docstring for details.
2595
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002596Build
2597-----
2598
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002599- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2600 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002601
2602C API
2603-----
2604
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002605- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2606
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002607- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2608 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2609 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2610
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002611- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2612 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002613
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002614 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2615 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2616 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002617
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002618- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002619 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2620
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002621- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2622 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2623 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002624
2625New platforms
2626-------------
2627
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002628None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002629
2630Tests
2631-----
2632
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002633- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2634 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002635
2636Windows
2637-------
2638
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002639- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2640 function.
2641
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002642- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2643 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002644
2645Mac
2646---
2647
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002648- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2649 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002650
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002651- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2652 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002653
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002654- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2655 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2656 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002657
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002658- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002659 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2660 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002661
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002662- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2663 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002664
2665
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002666What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2667=================================
2668
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002669*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002670
2671Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002672-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002673
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002674- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2675 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2676 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2677
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002678- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2679 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2680 (SF patch #664376.)
2681
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002682- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2683 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2684 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2685 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2686 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2687 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002688 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002689
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002690- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2691 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2692 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2693 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002694 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002695
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002696- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2697 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2698 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2699 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2700 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2701 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2702 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2703 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2704 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2705 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2706 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2707
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002708- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2709 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2710 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2711 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2712 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2713 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2714
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002715- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2716 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2717
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002718- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2719 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2720 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2721 case.)
2722
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002723- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2724 passed as unicode strings.
2725
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002726- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2727 See SF bug #683467.
2728
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002729- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2730 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2731
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002732- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2733
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002734- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2735
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002736- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2737 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2738 arguments.
2739
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002740- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2741 See SF bug #667147.
2742
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002743- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002744 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002745 See SF bug #676155.
2746
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002747- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002748 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002749 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2750 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2751 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2752 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2753 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2754 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002755
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002756Extension modules
2757-----------------
2758
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002759- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2760 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2761 tp_as_number pointer.
2762
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002763- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2764 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2765 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2766 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2767 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2768
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002769- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2770
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002771- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2772
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002773- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002774 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002775 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2776 patch #678531.)
2777
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002778- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2779 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2780
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002781- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2782 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2783
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002784- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2785
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002786- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2787 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2788 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2789
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002790- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2791
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002792- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2793 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2794
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002795- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002796
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002797- datetime changes:
2798
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002799 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2800
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002801 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2802 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2803 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2804 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2805 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2806 now.
2807
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002808 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002809 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2810 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002811
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002812 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002813 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002814 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2815 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2816 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2817 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002818
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002819 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2820 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2821 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002822 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2823
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002824 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2825 by a later example coded by Guido.
2826
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002827 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002828 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2829 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2830 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002831 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2832 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2833
2834 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2835 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2836 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2837 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2838 tzinfo subclass instance.
2839
2840 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2841 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2842 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2843 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2844 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2845 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2846 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2847 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002848
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002849 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2850 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2851 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2852 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2853 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002854 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2855
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002856 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002857
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002858 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2859 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2860 as a naive datetime object.
2861
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002862 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2863 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2864 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2865
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002866 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2867 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2868 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2869 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2870 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2871 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2872 comparison.
2873
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002874 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2875 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2876 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2877 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002878 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002879
2880 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002881
2882 and ::
2883
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002884 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2885
2886 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2887 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2888 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2889 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2890
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002891 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2892 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2893 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2894 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2895 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2896
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002897 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2898 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002899 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2900 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002901
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002902Library
2903-------
2904
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002905- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2906 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2907
2908- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2909 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2910 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2911 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2912 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2913 See PEP 307 for details.
2914
2915- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2916 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2917
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002918- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2919 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002920 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002921 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2922 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002923 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002924
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002925- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2926 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2927
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002928- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2929 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2930 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2931
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002932- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2933
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002934- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2935 exception.
2936
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002937- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2938 class.
2939
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002940- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2941 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2942 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2943
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002944- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2945 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2946
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002947- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002948 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2949 See SF bug #659228.
2950
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002951- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2952 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2953 See SF patch #651082.
2954
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002955- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002956
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002957- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2958 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2959
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002960- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002961 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002962
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002963- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2964 DOS paths from other platforms.
2965
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002966Tools/Demos
2967-----------
2968
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002969- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2970 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2971 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2972 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2973 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2974 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2975 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2976 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2977 example:
2978
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002979 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2980 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002981
2982 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2983
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002984
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002985Build
2986-----
2987
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002988- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2989 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2990 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002991 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2992
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002993 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2994
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002995- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2996 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2997 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2998 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2999 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
3000 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
3001 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
3002 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
3003 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
3004
3005- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
3006 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
3007 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
3008 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
3009
3010- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
3011 from the Tools/scripts directory.
3012
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003013C API
3014-----
3015
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00003016- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
3017 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00003018
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00003019- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
3020 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
3021 tp_as_number pointer.
3022
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00003023- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
3024 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
3025 (SF #681367)
3026
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00003027- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
3028 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
3029 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
3030 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00003031
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003032Tests
3033-----
3034
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00003035- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003036 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
3037 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
3038 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
3039 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
3040 pydoc.)
3041
3042- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
3043
3044- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003045
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003046Windows
3047-------
3048
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00003049- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
3050 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
3051 time).
3052
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00003053- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
3054 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
3055
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00003056- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
3057 release without strong cryptography.
3058
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003059- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00003060 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00003061
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003062- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
3063 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
3064
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003065Mac
3066---
3067
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003068- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
3069 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00003070
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00003071- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
3072 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
3073 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00003074
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00003075- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
3076 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003077
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003078- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
3079 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
3080 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
3081 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00003082
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00003083- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00003084 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
3085 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
3086 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003087
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00003088
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003089What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003090=================================
3091
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00003092*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003093
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003094Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003095--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003096
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00003097- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
3098
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003099- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
3100 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003101 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00003102 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00003103 a different meaning than before.
3104
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003105- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003106 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00003107 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003108
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003109- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003110 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003111 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00003112
3113- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
3114 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
3115 and deallocation.
3116
3117- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
3118 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
3119
3120- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
3121 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
3122 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
3123 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
3124 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
3125
3126- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
3127 now detected by the garbage collector.
3128
3129- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
3130 [SF bug 519621]
3131
3132- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
3133 identifier.
3134
3135- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
3136 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
3137 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
3138 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
3139 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
3140 [SF bug 563060]
3141
3142- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
3143 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
3144 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
3145 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
3146 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
3147
3148- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
3149 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
3150 not called. [SF bug #537450]
3151
3152- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
3153
3154- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
3155 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
3156 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
3157 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
3158 state of the slots would be lost.)
3159
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003160Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003161-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003162
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003163- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003164 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
3165 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
3166 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
3167 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003168 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
3169 Jython 2.1.
3170
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003171- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003172 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00003173 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
3174 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
3175 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
3176 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
3177 these, see PEP 302.
3178
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003179- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
3180 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
3181 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
3182
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00003183- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
3184 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
3185 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
3186
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00003187- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
3188 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
3189 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
3190
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003191- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
3192 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
3193 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
3194 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
3195 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
3196 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
3197 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
3198 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
3199 releases or implementations.
3200
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003201- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003202 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
3203 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00003204
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00003205- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
3206 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
3207
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003208- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
3209 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
3210 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
3211
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00003212- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
3213 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
3214
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003215- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
3216 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003217 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
3218 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00003219
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00003220- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
3221 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
3222 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
3223 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
3224 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
3225
3226 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
3227 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
3228 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
3229 pattern.
3230
3231 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
3232 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
3233 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
3234 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
3235
3236 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
3237 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
3238 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
3239 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
3240 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
3241 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
3242
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00003243- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
3244 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
3245 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
3246 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
3247 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
3248 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
3249 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
3250 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00003251
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00003252- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
3253 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
3254 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
3255 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
3256 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003257 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
3258 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
3259 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
3260 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
3261 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
3262 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
3263 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003264
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003265- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
3266 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
3267
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00003268- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
3269 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
3270 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
3271 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
3272 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
3273 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
3274 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
3275 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
3276 to Zack Weinberg!
3277
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00003278- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
3279 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
3280 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
3281 type. This has been fixed now.
3282
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00003283- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
3284 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
3285 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
3286
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003287- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
3288 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
3289 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
3290 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
3291 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
3292 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
3293 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
3294 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00003295 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003296
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00003297- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
3298 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
3299 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00003300
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003301- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
3302 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
3303 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
3304 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
3305 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
3306 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
3307 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
3308 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003309 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003310 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
3311 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3312
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003313- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3314 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3315 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3316 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3317 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3318 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3319 this.)
3320
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003321- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3322 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003323 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003324 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003325 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3326 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003327 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3328 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003329
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003330- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3331 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3332 currently running.
3333
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003334- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3335 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3336 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3337 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3338
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003339- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3340 as directory names.
3341
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003342- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3343 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3344
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003345- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3346 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3347
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003348- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003349 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3350 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003351
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003352- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3353 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3354 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3355 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3356 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3357
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003358- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3359 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3360 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3361 removed.
3362
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003363- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3364 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3365 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3366
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003367- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3368 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3369 to __debug__.
3370
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003371- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3372 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3373 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3374
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003375- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3376 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3377 deprecated now.
3378
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003379- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3380 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3381 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003382
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003383- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3384 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3385 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3386 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3387 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003388
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003389- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3390 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3391
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003392- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3393 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3394 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003395 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003396 is backward compatible.
3397
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003398- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3399 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3400 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3401 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3402 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3403
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003404- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3405 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3406 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3407 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3408 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3409 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003410
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003411- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3412 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3413
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003414- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3415 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3416
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003417- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3418 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3419 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3420 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3421 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3422
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003423- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3424 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3425 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3426
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003427- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003428 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3429
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003430- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3431 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3432 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003433
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003434- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3435 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3436
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003437- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3438 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3439 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3440
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003441- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3442
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003443Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003444-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003445
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003446- Added three operators to the operator module:
3447 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3448 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3449 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3450
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003451- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3452
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003453- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3454 archives.
3455
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003456- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3457 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3458 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3459
3460 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3461
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003462- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3463 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3464 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003465 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003466
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003467- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3468 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3469 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3470 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003471 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3472 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3473 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3474 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003475
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003476- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3477 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003478
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003479- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3480
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003481- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3482 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3483
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003484- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3485 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3486 supported.
3487
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003488- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3489
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003490- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3491 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003492
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003493- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3494 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3495
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003496- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3497
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003498- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3499 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3500
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003501- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3502 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3503 functions but callable type objects.
3504
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003505- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003506 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003507 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003508
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003509- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3510 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003511
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003512- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3513 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003514
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003515- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3516 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3517 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3518 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3519
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003520- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3521 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003522
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003523- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3524 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3525 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3526 and __imul__.
3527
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003528- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003529 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3530 is called.
3531
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003532- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3533 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3534 interpreter was compiled.
3535
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003536- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3537 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3538 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003539 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003540 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3541 1, not 2.
3542
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003543- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3544 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3545 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3546 limit.
3547
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003548- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3549 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3550 bug #623464.
3551
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003552- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3553 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3554 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3555 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3556
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003557Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003558-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003559
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003560- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3561
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003562- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3563 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3564 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3565 with Python 2.3a2.
3566
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003567- os.path exposes getctime.
3568
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003569- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003570 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003571 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003572 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003573 unit tests of floating point results.
3574
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003575- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3576 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3577 has been increased.
3578
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003579- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3580 executed.
3581
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003582- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3583 postinstallation script.
3584
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003585- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3586 test the current module.
3587
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003588- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003589 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3590 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3591 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3592 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3593
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003594- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003595 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003596 Ward's Optik package.
3597
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003598- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3599 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3600 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3601 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3602
3603- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3604 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003605 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003606
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003607- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3608 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3609 shelf are binary pickles.
3610
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003611- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3612 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3613
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003614- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3615 modules are iterators now.
3616
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003617- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3618 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3619 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3620 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3621 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3622 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003623
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003624- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3625 with their entity value.
3626
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003627- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3628
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003629- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3630 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003631
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003632- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3633 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003634 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003635
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003636- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3637 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3638 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3639 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3640 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3641 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3642 main():
3643
3644 import locale
3645 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3646
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003647- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3648 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3649
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003650- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3651 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3652 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3653 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3654 to the new standard.
3655
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003656- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3657 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3658 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3659 an extension to the database.
3660
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003661- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3662 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3663 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3664 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003665 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003666
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003667- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003668 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003669
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003670- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3671 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3672 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3673 bounded integers.
3674
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003675- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3676 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3677 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3678 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3679 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3680 in existence.
3681
3682 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3683 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3684 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3685 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3686 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3687 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3688
3689 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3690 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3691 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3692 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3693
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003694- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3695 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3696 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3697
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003698- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3699
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003700- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3701 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3702 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3703 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3704
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003705- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3706 argument.
3707
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003708- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3709 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3710 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3711 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3712 [SF patch 560794].
3713
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003714- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3715 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3716 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003717 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3718 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3719 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003720
3721- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3722 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003723
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003724- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3725 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3726 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3727 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003728
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003729- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3730 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3731 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3732 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3733 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3734
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003735- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003736
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003737- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3738
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003739- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3740 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3741 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3742 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3743 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3744 identical to None.
3745
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003746- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3747 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3748 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3749 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3750 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3751 results now.
3752
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003753- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3754 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3755
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003756- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3757 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3758 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3759 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3760 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3761 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3762 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3763 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3764
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003765- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3766
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003767- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3768 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3769
3770- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3771 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3772 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3773 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3774 and other systems.
3775
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003776- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3777 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3778 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3779 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 +00003780 work well with these.
3781
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003782- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3783
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003784- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003785 connections.
3786
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003787- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3788 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3789 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3790
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003791- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3792 sets
3793
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003794- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3795 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3796 name.
3797
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003798- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3799 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3800 passed in.
3801
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003802- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003803 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003804 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3805 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003806
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003807- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3808
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003809- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3810
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003811- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3812 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3813 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3814
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003815- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3816 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3817 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3818 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003819 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003820
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003821- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003822 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003823 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003824
3825- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3826 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3827 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3828
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003829- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003830 the value of its expression argument.
3831
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003832- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3833 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3834 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3835
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003836- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3837 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3838 skipstone browser was included.
3839
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003840- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3841 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3842
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003843Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003844-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003845
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003846- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3847 names in addition to accepting file names.
3848
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003849- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3850 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3851 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3852 still used and useful.)
3853
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003854- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3855 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3856 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3857 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003858
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003859- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3860 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3861 the generated binary.
3862
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003863Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003864-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003865
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003866- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3867
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003868- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3869 except in the hands of experts.
3870
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003871- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003872 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3873 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3874 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003875
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003876- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3877 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3878 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3879 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3880 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3881 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3882 builds.
3883
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003884- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3885 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3886 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3887 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3888 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3889 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3890 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3891 new type.
3892
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003893- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003894
3895 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3896 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3897 positive infinities.
3898
3899 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3900 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3901 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3902 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3903 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3904 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3905 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3906
3907 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3908
3909 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3910
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003911- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3912 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3913 size of the executable.
3914
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003915- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3916 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3917 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3918 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003919
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003920- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3921
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003922- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3923 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3924 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003925
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003926- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3927 well as Unix.
3928
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003929- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3930 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3931 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3932 modules in the README file for details.
3933
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003934C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003935-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003936
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003937- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3938 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003939 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003940 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003941 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003942
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003943- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3944 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3945 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3946 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3947 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3948 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003949 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003950 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3951 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3952 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3953 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3954 aligned.)
3955
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003956- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3957 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3958 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3959
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003960- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3961 level.
3962
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003963- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3964 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3965 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3966 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3967 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3968
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003969- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3970 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3971 code.
3972
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003973- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3974 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3975 adjusting for negative indices.
3976
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003977- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3978 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3979 object.
3980
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003981- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3982 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3983 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3984
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003985- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3986 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003987
3988- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3989
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003990- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3991 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3992 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3993 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3994
3995- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3996
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003997- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003998
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003999- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00004000 without going through the buffer API.
4001
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004002- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00004003
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00004004- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
4005 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
4006 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
4007 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
4008
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004009- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
4010 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
4011
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004012- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00004013 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
4014
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004015New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004016-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004017
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00004018- OpenVMS is now supported.
4019
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00004020- AtheOS is now supported.
4021
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00004022- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
4023
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00004024- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
4025
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004026Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004027-----
4028
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00004029- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
4030 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
4031 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004032
4033Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004034-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004035
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004036- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
4037 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
4038 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
4039 bugs.
4040 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004041 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00004042 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
4043 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004044 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00004045
4046- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00004047 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00004048
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00004049- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
4050 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
4051
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004052- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
4053 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004054 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00004055 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
4056
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00004057- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
4058 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
4059 use files" uninstall option).
4060
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00004061- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
4062
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004063- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
4064 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
4065
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00004066- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
4067 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
4068 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
4069
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004070- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
4071 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
4072 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
4073 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
4074 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00004075 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
4076 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
4077 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00004078
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004079- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004080 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00004081 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
4082 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
4083 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
4084 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
4085 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
4086 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
4087 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
4088 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
4089 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
4090 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
4091 work around.
4092
4093- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
4094 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
4095 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
4096 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
4097 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
4098 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
4099 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
4100 specified with O_CREAT too).
4101
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004102Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004103----
4104
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004105- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004106
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00004107- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
4108 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
4109 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
4110
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004111- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
4112 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
4113 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
4114
4115- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
4116 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
4117 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
4118 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
4119 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
4120 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
4121 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
4122 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00004123
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00004124- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
4125 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
4126 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004127
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004128- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
4129 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
4130 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
4131 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
4132 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004133
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004134- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
4135 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
4136 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004137
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004138- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
4139 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004140
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004141- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
4142 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
4143 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
4144 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
4145 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004146
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004147- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
4148 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
4149 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
4150
4151- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
4152 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
4153 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004154
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004155- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
4156 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
4157 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
4158 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004159 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004160
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004161- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
4162 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004163
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00004164- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
4165 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00004166
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004167- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00004168 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00004169 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
4170 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00004171
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00004172
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004173What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004174===============================
4175
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004176*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
4177
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004178Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004179--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004180
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004181- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
4182 with a custom metaclass.
4183
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004184Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004185-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004186
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004187- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
4188 are proxies.
4189
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004190Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004191-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004192
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004193- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
4194 very short strings.
4195
4196- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
4197 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
4198 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
4199 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
4200 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
4201
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004202Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004203-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004204
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004205- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
4206 close or delete time).
4207
4208- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
4209 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
4210
4211- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
4212
4213- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004214 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004215
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004216Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004217-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004218
4219Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004220-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004221
4222C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004223-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004224
4225New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004226-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004227
4228Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004229-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004230
4231Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004232-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004233
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004234- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
4235
4236- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
4237 instances are deleted at process exit time.
4238
4239- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
4240 deleted at process exit time.
4241
4242- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
4243 in backslash.
4244
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004245Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004246----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004247
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00004248- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
4249 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
4250 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
4251
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00004252
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00004253What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004254===========================
4255
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004256*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
4257
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004258Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004259--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004260
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004261- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
4262 been extensively updated. See
4263
4264 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
4265
4266 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
4267
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00004268- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
4269 deleted!
4270
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00004271- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
4272 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
4273 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
4274 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
4275 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
4276
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004277- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
4278
4279 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
4280 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
4281
4282 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
4283 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
4284 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
4285 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
4286 supported anyway.
4287
4288 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
4289 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
4290
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00004291- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
4292 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
4293 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
4294 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
4295 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00004296
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00004297- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
4298 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
4299 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
4300
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004301Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004302-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004303
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004304- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
4305 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
4306 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
4307 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
4308 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
4309 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00004310 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
4311 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4312 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4313 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004314
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004315- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4316 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4317 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4318
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004319Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004320-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004321
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004322- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4323
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004324Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004325-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004326
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004327- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4328 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4329 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4330 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4331 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4332 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4333
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004334- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4335
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004336- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4337
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004338- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4339
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004340- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4341 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4342 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4343
4344- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4345
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004346Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004347-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004348
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004349- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4350 off a search on Google.
4351
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004352Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004354
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004355- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4356 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4357 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4358 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4359 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4360 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4361 other platforms should do likewise.
4362
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004363- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4364 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4365 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4366
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004367C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004368-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004369
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004370- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4371 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4372 producing key-value pairs.
4373
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004374- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004375 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004376 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4377 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4378 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4379 previously went unchallenged.
4380
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004381New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004382-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004383
4384Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004385-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004386
4387Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004388-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004389
4390Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004391----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004392
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004393- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4394 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004395
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004396- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4397 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4398 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4399 home.
4400
4401
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004402What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004403===========================
4404
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004405*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4406
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004407Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004408--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004409
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004410- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4411 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004412
4413 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004414 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004415
4416 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4417 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004418 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004419 This needs to be documented.
4420
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004421- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4422 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4423
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004424- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4425 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4426 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4427
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004428- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4429 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4430
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004431- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4432 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4433 class forbids it).
4434
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004435- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4436 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4437 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4438
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004439- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4440
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004441Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004443
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004444- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4445 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004446 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004447
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004448- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4449 (like 1 + '').
4450
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004451Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004452-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004453
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004454- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4455 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4456 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4457 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004458 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004459 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4460
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004461- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4462 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4463 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4464 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4465
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004466- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4467 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004468 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4469 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4470 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004471
4472- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4473 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004474
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004475- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4476 bytes on its input.
4477
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004478Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004479-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004480
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004481- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004482 convenience function.
4483
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004484- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4485 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4486 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004487 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4488 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4489 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4490 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4491 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4492 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004493
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004494- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4495 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4496 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4497 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4498
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004499- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4500 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4501 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4502
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004503- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4504 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4505 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4506 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4507
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004508- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4509 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004510 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004511 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4512 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4513 new -l and -e options.
4514
4515- statcache is now deprecated.
4516
4517- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4518 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004519 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004520 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4521 time properly taken into account.
4522
4523- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4524 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4525 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4526 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4527
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004528Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004529-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004530
4531Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004532-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004533
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004534- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4535 is built with libdb3 if available.
4536
4537- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4538
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004539C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004540-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004541
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004542- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4543 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4544 PySequence_Size().
4545
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004546- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4547
4548- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4549 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4550 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4551
4552- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4553 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4554
4555- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4556 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4557
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004558New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004560
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004561- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4562 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4563
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004564- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4565 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4566
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004567- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4568
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004569Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004570-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004571
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004572- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4573 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4574
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004575Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004576-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004577
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004578Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004579----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004580
4581- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4582 removed completely in the next release.
4583
4584- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4585 OSX.
4586
4587- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4588 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4589
4590- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4591
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004592
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004593What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004594===========================
4595
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004596*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4597
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004598Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004599--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004600
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004601- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004602 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004603 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004604 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4605 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004606 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4607 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004608 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4609 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004610
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004611- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4612 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4613
4614- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4615 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4616
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004617Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004618-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004619
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004620- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4621 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4622 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4623 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4624 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4625 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4626 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4627 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4628
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004629- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4630 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4631 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4632 example).
4633
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004634- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004635 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004636 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004637 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004638
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004639- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4640 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4641 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004642 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004643
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004644- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4645 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4646 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4647 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4648 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4649 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4650
4651 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4652
4653 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4654
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004655Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004656-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004657
4658- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4659
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004660- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4661
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004662- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4663 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004664
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004665- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4666 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4667 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4668 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4669 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4670 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004671 attributes.
4672
4673- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4674 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4675 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004676
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004677- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4678 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4679 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004680
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004681- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4682 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4683 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004684 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4685 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4686
4687- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4688 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004689
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004690Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004691-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004692
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004693- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4694 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4695
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004696- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4697 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4698 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4699 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4700
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004701- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4702 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4703 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4704 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4705
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004706 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4707 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4708 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4709 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4710 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4711 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4712 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4713 without losing information).
4714
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004715- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004716 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4717 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4718 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4719 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4720 module).
4721
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004722 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004723 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4724 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4725 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4726 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004727
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004728- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004729 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4730 encoding.
4731
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004732- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4733 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4734
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004735- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004736 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4737
4738- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4739 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4740 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4741 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4742
4743- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4744
4745- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4746 ON, and OFF.
4747
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004748- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4749 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4750
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004751Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004752-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004753
4754- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4755 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4756 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004757
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004758- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4759 been added: -X and -E.
4760
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004761Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004762-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004763
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004764- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4765 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4766
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004767C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004768-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004769
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004770- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4771 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4772 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4773 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4774 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4775
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004776- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4777 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4778 as long) arguments.
4779
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004780- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4781 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4782 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4783 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4784 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4785 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4786
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004787- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4788 input.
4789
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004790New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004791-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004792
4793Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004794-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004795
4796Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004797-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004798
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004799- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4800 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4801 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4802
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004803- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4804 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4805 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004806 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004807
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004808 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4809 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4810 import signal
4811 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004812
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004813 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004814 while 1:
4815 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004816 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004817 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4818 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4819 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4820 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004821
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004822
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004823What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4824===========================
4825
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004826*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4827
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004828Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004829--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004830
4831- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4832 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4833 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4834
4835- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4836 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4837 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4838 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4839 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4840 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4841 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004842
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004843- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004844 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004845 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4846 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4847 associate a docstring with a property.
4848
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004849- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4850 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4851 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4852 other built-in object types.
4853
4854- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4855 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4856 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4857 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4858 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4859
4860- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4861 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4862
4863- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4864 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004865 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004866 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4867 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4868 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4869 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4870 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4871
4872- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4873 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4874 class.
4875
4876- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4877 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4878 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4879 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4880
4881- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4882 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4883 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4884 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4885
4886- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4887 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4888
4889- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4890 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4891 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4892 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4893 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004894 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004895 with the same value as s.
4896
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004897- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4898
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004899Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004900----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004901
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004902- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4903
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004904- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4905 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4906 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4907 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4908 objects.
4909
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004910- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4911 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004912 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4913 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4914
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004915- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4916 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4917 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4918
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004919Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004920-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004921
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004922- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4923 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4924 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4925 by the instances.
4926
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004927- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4928 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4929 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4930
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004931- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4932 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4933 before the entire comparison is complete.
4934
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004935- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4936 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4937 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4938
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004939- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4940 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4941 getwriter().
4942
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004943- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4944 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4945
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004946- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004947 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4948 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4949
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004950- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4951 iterable object.
4952
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004953- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4954 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004955
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004956- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4957 authentication.
4958
4959- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4960 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004961
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004962- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004963 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4964 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4965 a sample driver.)
4966
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004967Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004968-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004969
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004970- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4971 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4972 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4973 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4974 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4975 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4976 kernel has large file support.
4977
4978- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4979 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4980 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4981 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4982 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4983
4984- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4985 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4986 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4987
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004988C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004989-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004990
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004991- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4992 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4993
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004994New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004995-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004996
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004997- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4998 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4999
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005000Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005001-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005002
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005003- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
5004 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
5005 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
5006 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
5007 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
5008
5009- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
5010 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
5011 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
5012 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
5013
5014- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
5015 especially in regard to reporting errors.
5016
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005017Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005018-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005019
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005020- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00005021 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
5022 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00005023
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00005024
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005025What's New in Python 2.2a3?
5026===========================
5027
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005028*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
5029
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005030Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005031----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005032
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005033- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
5034 big to represent as a C double.
5035
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00005036- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
5037 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
5038 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
5039 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
5040 restriction).
5041
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00005042- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
5043 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
5044 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
5045 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
5046 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
5047
5048 >>> dir([])
5049 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
5050 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
5051 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
5052 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
5053 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
5054 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
5055 'reverse', 'sort']
5056
5057 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
5058
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005059- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005060 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
5061 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
5062 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
5063 OverflowError exception.
5064
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00005065- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005066 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005067 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
5068 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
5069 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
5070 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
5071 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00005072 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005073 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
5074 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
5075
5076 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
5077 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
5078 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
5079 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005080
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005081- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005082 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
5083 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
5084 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
5085 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
5086 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
5087 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
5088 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
5089 once it is created.
5090
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00005091- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
5092 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
5093 (key, value) pairs.
5094
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005095- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005096 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
5097 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
5098
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00005099- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
5100 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
5101 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
5102 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
5103 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005104
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005105- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005106 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
5107 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
5108
5109 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
5110
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005111- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00005112 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
5113
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005114Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005115-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005116
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005117- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00005118 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
5119 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00005120
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00005121- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
5122 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
5123 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
5124 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
5125 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
5126 in this area anymore).
5127
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00005128- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
5129 threading.Timer.
5130
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00005131- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
5132 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
5133
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005134- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005135 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
5136
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005137- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00005138 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
5139 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
5140 converted to Python longs.
5141
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005142- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005143 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
5144
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00005145- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
5146 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
5147 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
5148
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005149Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005150-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005151
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005152- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
5153 division operators as per PEP 238.
5154
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005155Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005156-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005157
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00005158- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
5159 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
5160 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
5161 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
5162
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005163C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005164-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00005165
5166- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005167
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005168- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
5169 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005170 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005171
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005172 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
5173 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00005174 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005175 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00005176
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005177- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005178 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
5179 module:
5180
5181 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005182
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005183 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
5184 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005185
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005186 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
5187 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00005188
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00005189 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
5190
5191 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
5192
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005193- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00005194 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
5195 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
5196 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00005197
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005198New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005199-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005200
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00005201- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
5202 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
5203 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
5204 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
5205 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005206
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005207Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005208-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005209
5210Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005211-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005212
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005213- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
5214 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
5215 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
5216 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00005217 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
5218 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
5219 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
5220 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
5221 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00005222
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00005223- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00005224 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
5225
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00005226
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005227What's New in Python 2.2a2?
5228===========================
5229
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005230*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
5231
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005232Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005233-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005234
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00005235- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
5236 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
5237
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005238- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
5239 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
5240 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005241
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00005242- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
5243 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
5244 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
5245 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005246
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005247- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
5248
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005249- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005250
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005251Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005252-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005253
5254- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00005255 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005256 the module docstring for details.
5257
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005258Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005259-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005260
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005261- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005262 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
5263 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
5264 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005265
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005266- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
5267 Nick Mathewson.
5268
5269Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005270----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005271
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005272- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
5273 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
5274 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
5275 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
5276 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
5277 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
5278 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
5279 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
5280
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00005281- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
5282 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
5283 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
5284 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
5285
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00005286- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
5287 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
5288 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
5289 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
5290 come a long way).
5291
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005292- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
5293 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
5294 write filters for these warnings).
5295
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00005296- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
5297 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
5298 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
5299 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
5300 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
5301
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00005302- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
5303 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
5304 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
5305 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
5306 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
5307 older distribution.
5308
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005309Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005310-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005311
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005312- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5313 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005314 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005315
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005316- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5317 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5318 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5319
5320- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5321
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005322- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5323
5324- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5325
5326- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5327
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005328- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005329
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005330- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5331
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005332New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005333-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005334
5335C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005336-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005337
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005338- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5339 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5340 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5341 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5342 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5343 against buffer overruns.
5344
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005345- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005346 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5347 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005348 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5349 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5350 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5351
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005352- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5353 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5354 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5355 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5356 deprecated.
5357
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005358Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005359-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005360
5361- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5362 relevant is found.
5363
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005364
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005365What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005366===========================
5367
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005368*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5369
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005370Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005371----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005372
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005373- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5374 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5375 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5376 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5377 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5378 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5379 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5380 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005381 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005382 repaired.
5383
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005384- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005385 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005386 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5387 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5388 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5389 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5390 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5391 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5392 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5393 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5394
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005395- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5396 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5397 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5398 leading BMO character).
5399
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005400- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5401 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5402 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5403
5404 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5405 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5406 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005407
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005408 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5409 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5410 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5411 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5412 for various simple to use conversions.
5413
5414 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5415 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5416
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005417 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5418 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5419 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5420 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5421 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5422 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5423 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5424 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5425 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5426 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5427 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5428 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5429 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5430 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5431 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005432
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005433- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5434 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5435 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005436 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005437 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005438
5439 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005440 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5441 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5442 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5443 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5444 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005445 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5446 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005447
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005448 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5449 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5450 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005451 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005452
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005453- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5454 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5455 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5456 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5457 floating arithmetic,
5458
5459 x = 9007199254740992.0
5460 print long(x)
5461
5462 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5463 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5464 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5465 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5466 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5467 functions are of good quality).
5468
5469 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5470 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5471 algorithms to break.
5472
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005473- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5474 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5475 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5476 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5477 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5478 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5479 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5480 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5481 order.
5482
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005483- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5484 operation along the most common code paths.
5485
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005486- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5487 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5488
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005489- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5490 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5491 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5492 {}.update(UserDict())
5493
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005494- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5495 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5496 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5497 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5498 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5499 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5500 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5501 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5502
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005503- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005504 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005505
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005506 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005507 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5508 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005509 join() method of strings
5510 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005511 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5512 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005513 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005514 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005515
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005516- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5517 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5518
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005519- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5520 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5521
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005522- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5523 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5524 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5525 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5526
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005527- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5528 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005529 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005530 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5531 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005532
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005533- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5534
5535
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005536Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005537-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005538
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005539- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005540 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005541 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5542 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5543
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005544- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5545 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5546
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005547- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5548 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5549 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5550 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5551
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005552- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5553 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5554 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5555
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005556- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5557
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005558- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5559
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005560- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5561 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5562 that are still imported into string.py).
5563
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005564- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5565
5566- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5567 Now it does.
5568
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005569- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5570
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005571- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5572 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5573 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5574 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5575 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005576 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5577 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005578
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005579- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5580 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5581 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5582 'help(object)'.
5583
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005584Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005585-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005586
5587- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005588 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005589 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5590 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5591
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005592- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005593 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5594 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005595
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005596C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005597-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005598
5599- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5600 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005601
5602----
5603
5604**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**