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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +000015- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
16 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
17 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +000018
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000019- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
20 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
21
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000022- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
23
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000024- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
25 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
26
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000027- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
28
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000029- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
30
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000031- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
32 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
33
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000034- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
35 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
36 Fixes bug #858016 .
37
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000038- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
39 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
40 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
41
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000042- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
43 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
44 improves their performance (about 35%).
45
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000046- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
47 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
48 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
49
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000050- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
51 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
52 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
53 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
54
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000055- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
56 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
57 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
58 length is not known).
59
60- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
61 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000062 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
63 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000064 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
65
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000066- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
67 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
68
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000069- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
70 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
71 keyword arguments.
72
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000073- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
74 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
75 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
76
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000077- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
78 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
79 cases.
80
81- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
82 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
83 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
84 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
85 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
86 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
87 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
88 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
89 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
90 a release build.
91
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000092- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
93 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
94
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000095- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000096 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000097
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000098- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
99 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
100 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
101 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
102 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
103 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
104 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
105 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
106 destroyed.
107
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000108- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
109 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
110 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
111 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
112 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
113 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
114 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
115 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
116
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000117- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
118 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
119 character other than a space.
120
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000121- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
122 by the function object or by the method object, the function
123 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
124 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
125 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
126 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
127 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
128 attributes with the same name.
129
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000130- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
131 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
132 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
133 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
134 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
135 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
136 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
137 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
138 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
139 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
140 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
141 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
142 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
143 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000144
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000145- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
146 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
147 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
148 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
149 This has been repaired.
150
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000151- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
152
153- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
154
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000155- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
156 over a sequence.
157
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000158- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000159 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000160
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000161- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
162
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000163- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
164 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
165 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
166 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
167 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
168 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
169 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
170 records with equal keys is unchanged).
171
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000172- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
173 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
174 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
175
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000176- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
177 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
178 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
179 freelist.
180
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000181- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
182 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
183
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000184- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
185 number.
186
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000187- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
188 a TypeError exception.
189
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000190- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
191 820195.
192
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000193- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
194 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
195 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
196
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000197- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
198 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
199 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000200
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000201- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
202 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
203 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
204
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000205- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
206 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000207 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000208
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000209- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000210 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
211 the first call.
212
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000213
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000214Extension modules
215-----------------
216
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000217- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
218
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000219- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
220
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000221- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
222 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
223
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000224- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
225 fewer false positives.
226
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000227- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
228 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
229
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000230- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
231 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
232
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000233- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
234 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000235 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
236 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
237 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000238
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000239- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
240 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
241 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
242 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
243
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000244- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
245 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
246 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
247 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
248 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
249 #897625.
250
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000251- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
252 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
253
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000254- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
255 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
256 and pops on either side of the deque.
257
258- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
259 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
260
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000261- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
262 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
263 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
264 other functions that expect a function argument.
265
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000266- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
267
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000268- os.getsid was added.
269
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000270- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
271 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
272 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
273
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000274- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
275
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000276- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
277
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000278- readline.clear_history was added.
279
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000280- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
281
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000282- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
283
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000284- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
285
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000286- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
287
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000288- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
289
290- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
291
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000292- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
293
294- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
295
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000296- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
297 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
298 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
299
300- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
301 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
302 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
303 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
304 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
305 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
306 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
307
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000308- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
309 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
310 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
311 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000312
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000313- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
314 iterators from a single iterable.
315
316- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
317 of raising a TypeError exception.
318
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000319- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
320 as parameter.
321
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000322Library
323-------
324
Martin v. Löwiseac324b2004-06-03 09:18:35 +0000325- asyncore.loop now has repeat count parameter that defaults to infinity.
326
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000327- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
328 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
329 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
330
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000331- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
332 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
333 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
334
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000335- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
336
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000337- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
338
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000339- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
340 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
341
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000342- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
343 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
344 type pattern with the same value exists.
345
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000346- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
347 when run from the command prompt).
348
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000349- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
350 not taken into consideration when caching value.
351
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000352- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
353 default sort).
354
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000355- Added global runctx function to profile module
356
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000357- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
358
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000359- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
360
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000361- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
362
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000363- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
364 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
365 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
366 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
367 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
368 accordingly.
369
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000370- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
371 decoding standards.
372
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000373- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
374 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
375 called for all requests.
376
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000377- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
378 they are passed to the compiler.
379
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000380- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
381 indent, width and depth.
382
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000383- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
384 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
385
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000386- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
387 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
388
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000389- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
390
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000391- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
392
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000393- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
394
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000395- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
396 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
397
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000398- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
399 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000400
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000401- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
402 a string).
403
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000404- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
405
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000406- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
407
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000408- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
409
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000410- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
411
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000412- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
413 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
414 list of fieldnames.
415
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000416- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
417 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
418
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000419- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
420
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000421- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
422 empty lists.
423
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000424- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
425 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
426 and shelves.
427
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000428- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
429 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
430
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000431- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000432 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
433 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000434
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000435- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
436 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000437 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000438
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000439- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000440 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
441 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
442
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000443- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
444 and removed in Py2.4.
445
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000446- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
447
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000448- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
449
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000450Tools/Demos
451-----------
452
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000453- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
454 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
455
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000456- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
457
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000458- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
459 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
460 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
461 destination in situations where both files are given.
462
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000463- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
464 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
465 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
466 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
467
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000468- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
469
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000470- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
471 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
472 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
473 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
474 now.
475
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000476- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
477 in effect
478
479- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
480 C-c C-h
481
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000482- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
483 -d option was given.
484
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000485Build
486-----
487
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000488- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
489 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
490
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000491- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
492 removed.
493
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000494- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
495 supported (see PEP 11).
496
497- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
498
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000499- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
500
501- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
502 (see PEP 11).
503
504- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
505 sizeof(char) must be 1.
506
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000507C API
508-----
509
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000510- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
511 generator objects.
512
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000513- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
514 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000515 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
516 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000517
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000518- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
519 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
520
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000521- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
522 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
523 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
524 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
525 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
526
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000527- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
528 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
529 about 10% faster.
530
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000531- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
532 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
533
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000534- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
535 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
536 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
537 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
538
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000539New platforms
540-------------
541
542Tests
543-----
544
545Windows
546-------
547
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000548- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
549 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
550 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
551 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
552
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000553- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
554 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
555 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
556
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000557Mac
558----
559
560
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000561What's New in Python 2.3 final?
562===============================
563
564*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
565
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000566IDLE
567----
568
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000569- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
570 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
571 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
572 context-menu actions.
573
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000574- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
575 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
576 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
577 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
578 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
579 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
580 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
581 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
582 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
583
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000584
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000585What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
586=============================================
587
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000588*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000589
590Core and builtins
591-----------------
592
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000593- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000594 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000595 comment at the end are still unsupported.
596
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000597Extension modules
598-----------------
599
600- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
601 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
602 than once. This has been fixed.
603
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000604- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
605 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
606 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
607 call.
608
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000609- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
610
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000611Library
612-------
613
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000614- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
615 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
616
617- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
618 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
619 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
620 restored.
621
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000622IDLE
623----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000624
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000625- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000626
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000627Build
628-----
629
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000630- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
631 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
632
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000633C API
634-----
635
636Windows
637-------
638
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000639- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
640 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
641
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000642- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
643
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000644Mac
645---
646
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000647- Various fixes to pimp.
648
649- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
650
651- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
652 more problems than it solves.
653
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000654
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000655What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
656=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000657
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000658*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
659
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000660Core and builtins
661-----------------
662
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000663- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
664 by sys.setcheckinterval().
665
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000666- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
667 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000668 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000669
670- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
671 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
672 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000673 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000674
675- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
676 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000677
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000678- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
679 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
680 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
681
682- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000683 770247.
684
685- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000686
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000687Extension modules
688-----------------
689
690- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
691 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
692
693- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
694
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000695- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
696
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000697- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
698 contained within the _strptime module.
699
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000700- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
701 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
702
703- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000704 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
705
706- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
707 the find_class attribute, if present.
708
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000709- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000710
711 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
712 (SF bug 763298).
713
714 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000715 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
716 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
717 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000718
719 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
720
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000721Library
722-------
723
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000724- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
725
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000726- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
727 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
728 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
729 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
730 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
731 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
732 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
733 or Tester().
734
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000735- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
736 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
737 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
738 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
739 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
740 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
741 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
742 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
743 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000744
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000745 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000746
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000747- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
748 weren't before was an oversight.
749
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000750- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
751 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
752
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000753- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
754 when there are no lines.
755
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000756- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
757 which could occur with Tk 8.4
758
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000759- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
760 to child processes.
761
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000762- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
763
764- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
765
766- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
767 xmlrpclib.
768
769- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
770 responses.
771
772- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
773 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
774
775- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
776 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
777 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
778
779- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
780 used as patterns.
781
782- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
783 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
784 than Tk 8.3.
785
786- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
787
788- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000789
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000790Tools/Demos
791-----------
792
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000793- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
794
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000795- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
796
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000797- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000798
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000799Build
800-----
801
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000802- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
803
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000804- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
805
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000806- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
807 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000808
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000809- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
810 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
811 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000812
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000813C API
814-----
815
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000816- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
817 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
818
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000819Windows
820-------
821
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000822- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
823 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
824 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
825 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
826 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
827 Python exception ::
828
829 thread.error: can't start new thread
830
831 is raised now.
832
833- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
834 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
835 instead of from DLL teardown.
836
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000837Mac
838---
839
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000840- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000841 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000842 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
843 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
844 the executable in the bundle.
845
846- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000847
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000848- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
849
850- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
851 on Panther.
852
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000853What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
854================================
855
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000856*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000857
858Core and builtins
859-----------------
860
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000861- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
862 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
863 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
864 with the -i option.
865
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000866- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
867 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
868
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000869- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
870 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
871
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000872- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
873 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
874 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
875 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
876 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
877 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
878 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
879 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
880 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
881 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
882 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
883 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
884 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000885
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000886- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
887 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
888 embedded in a lambda expression.
889
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000890- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
891 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
892 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
893 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
894 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
895
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000896- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
897 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
898 matches the restriction on classic classes.
899
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000900- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
901 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
902
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000903- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
904 It's writable again.
905
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000906- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
907 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
908 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000909 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000910
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000911- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
912 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
913 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
914
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000915Extension modules
916-----------------
917
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000918- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
919 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
920
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000921- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
922 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
923 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
924 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
925
926- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
927 collection.
928
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000929- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
930 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
931 unique within a single program run.
932
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000933- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
934 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
935
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000936- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
937 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
938
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000939- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
940 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000941
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000942- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
943
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000944- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
945 Fixes SF bug #730685.
946
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000947- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
948 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
949 for many BSD-derived systems.
950
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000951
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000952Library
953-------
954
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000955- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
956 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
957 primary ones:
958
959 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
960 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
961 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
962
963 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
964 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
965 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
966 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
967 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
968 framework features (which doctest lacks).
969
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000970- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
971 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
972 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
973 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
974 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
975 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
976 argument.
977
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000978- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
979 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
980 in the archive.
981
982- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
983 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
984
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000985- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
986 569574).
987
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000988- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
989 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
990 no more.
991
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000992- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
993 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
994 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
995 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
996 code coverage.
997
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000998- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
999 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1000 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001001 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1002 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001003
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001004- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1005 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1006 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001007 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001008
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001009- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1010
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001011- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1012 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1013 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1014 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1015
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001016- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1017 handling.
1018
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001019- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1020 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1021
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001022- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1023 in socket.py.
1024
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001025- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1026
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001027- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1028 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1029 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1030 opener with proxy support.
1031
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001032- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1033
1034- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1035
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001036Tools/Demos
1037-----------
1038
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001039- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1040
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001041- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1042
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001043- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1044 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001045
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001046- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1047 files.
1048
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001049Build
1050-----
1051
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001052- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001053 different root directory.
1054
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001055C API
1056-----
1057
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001058- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1059 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1060 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1061 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1062 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1063 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1064 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1065 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1066 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1067 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1068
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001069- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1070 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1071 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1072 from Python.
1073
1074
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001075New platforms
1076-------------
1077
1078None this time.
1079
1080Tests
1081-----
1082
1083- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1084 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1085
1086Windows
1087-------
1088
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001089- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1090
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001091- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1092 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1093 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1094 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1095 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1096 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1097 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1098 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1099 that's what it's for.
1100
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001101Mac
1102---
1103
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001104- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1105 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1106 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1107 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001108- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1109 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1110- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001111
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001112SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1113------------------------------------
1114
1115430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1116598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1117622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1118661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1119683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1120697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1121713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1122724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1123727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1124729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1125730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1126731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1127732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1128733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1129735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1130740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1131744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1132745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1133747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1134749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1135751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1136753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1137755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1138757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1139760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1140
1141
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001142What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1143================================
1144
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001145*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001146
1147Core and builtins
1148-----------------
1149
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001150- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1151 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1152
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001153- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1154 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1155 and cannot be strings).
1156
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001157- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1158 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1159 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1160 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1161
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001162- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1163 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1164 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1165 Python itself.
1166
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001167- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1168 the referenced object, if it has one.
1169
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001170- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1171 the thread started at
1172 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1173
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001174- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1175 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1176 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1177 placed on a list index.
1178
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001179- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1180 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1181 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1182 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1183
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001184- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1185 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1186 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1187 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1188 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1189 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1190 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1191
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001192- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1193 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1194 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1195 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1196 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1197
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001198- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1199 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001200
1201- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1202 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1203 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1204 #693195.)
1205
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001206- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1207 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001208
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001209- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001210 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001211 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1212 interpreter executions, would fail.
1213
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001214- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001215 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001216 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001217
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001218Extension modules
1219-----------------
1220
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001221- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1222 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1223 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1224 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1225
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001226- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1227 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1228
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001229- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1230 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1231 and Greg Chapman.)
1232
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001233- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1234 recursively.
1235
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001236- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001237 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1238 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1239 leaks.
1240
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001241- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1242
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001243- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1244 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1245 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1246 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1247 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1248 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1249 #705836.
1250
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001251- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001252 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1253
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001254- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1255 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1256 See SF bug #692416.
1257
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001258- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1259 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1260
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001261- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1262 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1263 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001264
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001265- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001266 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1267 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1268
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001269- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1270 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1271 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1272 timeouts to work properly.
1273
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001274Library
1275-------
1276
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001277- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1278 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1279 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1280 future release.
1281
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001282- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1283 for querying platform dependent features.
1284
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001285- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001286
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001287- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1288 pickle protocol versions.
1289
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001290- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1291 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1292 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1293
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001294- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1295
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001296- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1297 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1298 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1299 modules.
1300
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001301- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1302 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1303 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1304
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001305- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1306 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1307
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001308- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1309 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1310 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1311
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001312- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001313 MS Office extensions.
1314
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001315- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1316 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1317
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001318- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1319 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1320
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001321- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1322 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1323 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1324 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1325 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1326 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1327
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001328- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1329 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1330 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001331
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001332- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1333 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1334 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1335
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001336- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1337
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001338- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1339 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1340 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1341
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001342Tools/Demos
1343-----------
1344
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001345- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1346 See the module docstring for details.
1347
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001348Build
1349-----
1350
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001351- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1352 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001353
1354C API
1355-----
1356
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001357- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1358
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001359- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1360 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1361 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1362
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001363- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1364 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001365
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001366 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1367 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1368 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001369
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001370- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001371 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1372
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001373- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1374 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1375 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001376
1377New platforms
1378-------------
1379
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001380None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001381
1382Tests
1383-----
1384
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001385- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1386 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001387
1388Windows
1389-------
1390
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001391- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1392 function.
1393
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001394- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1395 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001396
1397Mac
1398---
1399
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001400- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1401 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001402
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001403- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1404 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001405
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001406- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1407 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1408 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001409
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001410- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001411 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1412 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001413
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001414- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1415 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001416
1417
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001418What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1419=================================
1420
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001421*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001422
1423Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001424-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001425
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001426- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1427 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1428 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1429
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001430- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1431 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1432 (SF patch #664376.)
1433
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001434- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1435 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1436 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1437 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1438 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1439 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001440 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001441
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001442- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1443 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1444 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1445 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001446 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001447
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001448- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1449 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1450 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1451 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1452 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1453 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1454 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1455 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1456 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1457 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1458 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1459
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001460- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1461 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1462 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1463 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1464 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1465 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1466
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001467- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1468 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1469
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001470- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1471 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1472 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1473 case.)
1474
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001475- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1476 passed as unicode strings.
1477
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001478- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1479 See SF bug #683467.
1480
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001481- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1482 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1483
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001484- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1485
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001486- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1487
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001488- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1489 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1490 arguments.
1491
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001492- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1493 See SF bug #667147.
1494
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001495- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001496 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001497 See SF bug #676155.
1498
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001499- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001500 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001501 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1502 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1503 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1504 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1505 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1506 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001507
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001508Extension modules
1509-----------------
1510
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001511- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1512 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1513 tp_as_number pointer.
1514
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001515- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1516 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1517 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1518 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1519 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1520
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001521- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1522
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001523- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1524
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001525- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001526 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001527 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1528 patch #678531.)
1529
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001530- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1531 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1532
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001533- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1534 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1535
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001536- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1537
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001538- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1539 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1540 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1541
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001542- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1543
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001544- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1545 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1546
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001547- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001548
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001549- datetime changes:
1550
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001551 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1552
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001553 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1554 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1555 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1556 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1557 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1558 now.
1559
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001560 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001561 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1562 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001563
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001564 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001565 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001566 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1567 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1568 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1569 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001570
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001571 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1572 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1573 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001574 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1575
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001576 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1577 by a later example coded by Guido.
1578
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001579 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001580 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1581 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1582 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001583 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1584 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1585
1586 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1587 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1588 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1589 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1590 tzinfo subclass instance.
1591
1592 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1593 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1594 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1595 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1596 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1597 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1598 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1599 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001600
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001601 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1602 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1603 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1604 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1605 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001606 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1607
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001608 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001609
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001610 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1611 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1612 as a naive datetime object.
1613
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001614 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1615 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1616 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1617
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001618 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1619 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1620 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1621 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1622 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1623 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1624 comparison.
1625
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001626 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1627 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1628 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1629 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001630 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001631
1632 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001633
1634 and ::
1635
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001636 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1637
1638 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1639 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1640 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1641 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1642
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001643 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1644 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1645 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1646 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1647 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1648
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001649 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1650 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001651 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1652 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001653
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001654Library
1655-------
1656
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001657- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1658 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1659
1660- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1661 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1662 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1663 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1664 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1665 See PEP 307 for details.
1666
1667- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1668 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1669
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001670- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1671 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001672 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001673 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1674 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001675 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001676
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001677- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1678 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1679
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001680- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1681 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1682 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1683
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001684- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1685
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001686- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1687 exception.
1688
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001689- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1690 class.
1691
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001692- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1693 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1694 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1695
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001696- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1697 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1698
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001699- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001700 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1701 See SF bug #659228.
1702
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001703- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1704 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1705 See SF patch #651082.
1706
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001707- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001708
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001709- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1710 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1711
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001712- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001713 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001714
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001715- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1716 DOS paths from other platforms.
1717
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001718Tools/Demos
1719-----------
1720
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001721- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1722 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1723 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1724 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1725 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1726 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1727 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1728 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1729 example:
1730
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001731 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1732 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001733
1734 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1735
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001736
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001737Build
1738-----
1739
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001740- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1741 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1742 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001743 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1744
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001745 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1746
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001747- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1748 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1749 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1750 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1751 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1752 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1753 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1754 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1755 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1756
1757- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1758 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1759 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1760 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1761
1762- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1763 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1764
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001765C API
1766-----
1767
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001768- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1769 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001770
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001771- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1772 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1773 tp_as_number pointer.
1774
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001775- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1776 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1777 (SF #681367)
1778
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001779- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1780 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1781 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1782 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001783
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001784Tests
1785-----
1786
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001787- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001788 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1789 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1790 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1791 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1792 pydoc.)
1793
1794- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1795
1796- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001797
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001798Windows
1799-------
1800
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001801- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1802 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1803 time).
1804
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001805- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1806 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1807
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001808- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1809 release without strong cryptography.
1810
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001811- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001812 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001813
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001814- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1815 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1816
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001817Mac
1818---
1819
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001820- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1821 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001822
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001823- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1824 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1825 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001826
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001827- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1828 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001829
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001830- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1831 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1832 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1833 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001834
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001835- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001836 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1837 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1838 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001839
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001840
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001841What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001842=================================
1843
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001844*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001845
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001846Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001847--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001848
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001849- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1850
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001851- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1852 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001853 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001854 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001855 a different meaning than before.
1856
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001857- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001858 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001859 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001860
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001861- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001862 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001863 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001864
1865- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1866 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1867 and deallocation.
1868
1869- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1870 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1871
1872- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1873 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1874 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1875 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1876 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1877
1878- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1879 now detected by the garbage collector.
1880
1881- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1882 [SF bug 519621]
1883
1884- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1885 identifier.
1886
1887- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1888 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1889 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1890 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1891 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1892 [SF bug 563060]
1893
1894- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1895 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1896 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1897 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1898 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1899
1900- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1901 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1902 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1903
1904- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1905
1906- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1907 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1908 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1909 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1910 state of the slots would be lost.)
1911
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001912Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001913-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001914
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001915- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001916 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1917 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1918 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1919 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001920 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1921 Jython 2.1.
1922
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001923- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001924 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001925 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1926 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1927 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1928 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1929 these, see PEP 302.
1930
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001931- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1932 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1933 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1934
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001935- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1936 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1937 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1938
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001939- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1940 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1941 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1942
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001943- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1944 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1945 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1946 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1947 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1948 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1949 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1950 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1951 releases or implementations.
1952
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001953- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001954 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1955 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001956
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001957- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1958 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1959
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001960- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1961 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1962 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1963
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001964- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1965 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1966
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001967- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1968 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001969 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1970 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001971
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001972- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1973 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1974 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1975 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1976 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1977
1978 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1979 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1980 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1981 pattern.
1982
1983 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1984 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1985 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1986 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1987
1988 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1989 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1990 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1991 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1992 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1993 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1994
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001995- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1996 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1997 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1998 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1999 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2000 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2001 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2002 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002003
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002004- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2005 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2006 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2007 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2008 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002009 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2010 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2011 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2012 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2013 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2014 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2015 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002016
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002017- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2018 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2019
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002020- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2021 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2022 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2023 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2024 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2025 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2026 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2027 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2028 to Zack Weinberg!
2029
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002030- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2031 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2032 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2033 type. This has been fixed now.
2034
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002035- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2036 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2037 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2038
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002039- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2040 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2041 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2042 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2043 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2044 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2045 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2046 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002047 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002048
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002049- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2050 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2051 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002052
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002053- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2054 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2055 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2056 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2057 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2058 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2059 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2060 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002061 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002062 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2063 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2064
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002065- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2066 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2067 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2068 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2069 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2070 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2071 this.)
2072
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002073- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2074 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002075 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002076 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002077 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2078 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002079 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2080 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002081
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002082- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2083 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2084 currently running.
2085
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002086- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2087 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2088 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2089 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2090
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002091- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2092 as directory names.
2093
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002094- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2095 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2096
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002097- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2098 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2099
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002100- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002101 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2102 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002103
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002104- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2105 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2106 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2107 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2108 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2109
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002110- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2111 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2112 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2113 removed.
2114
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002115- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2116 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2117 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2118
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002119- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2120 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2121 to __debug__.
2122
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002123- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2124 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2125 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2126
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002127- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2128 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2129 deprecated now.
2130
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002131- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2132 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2133 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002134
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002135- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2136 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2137 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2138 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2139 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002140
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002141- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2142 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2143
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002144- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2145 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2146 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002147 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002148 is backward compatible.
2149
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002150- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2151 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2152 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2153 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2154 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2155
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002156- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2157 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2158 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2159 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2160 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2161 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002162
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002163- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2164 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2165
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002166- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2167 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2168
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002169- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2170 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2171 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2172 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2173 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2174
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002175- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2176 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2177 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2178
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002179- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002180 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2181
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002182- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2183 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2184 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002185
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002186- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2187 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2188
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002189- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2190 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2191 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2192
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002193- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2194
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002195Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002196-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002197
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002198- Added three operators to the operator module:
2199 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2200 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2201 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2202
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002203- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2204
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002205- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2206 archives.
2207
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002208- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2209 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2210 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2211
2212 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2213
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002214- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2215 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2216 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002217 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002218
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002219- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2220 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2221 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2222 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002223 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2224 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2225 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2226 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002227
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002228- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2229 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002230
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002231- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2232
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002233- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2234 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2235
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002236- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2237 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2238 supported.
2239
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002240- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2241
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002242- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2243 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002244
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002245- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2246 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2247
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002248- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2249
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002250- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2251 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2252
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002253- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2254 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2255 functions but callable type objects.
2256
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002257- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002258 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002259 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002260
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002261- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2262 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002263
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002264- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2265 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002266
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002267- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2268 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2269 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2270 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2271
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002272- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2273 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002274
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002275- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2276 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2277 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2278 and __imul__.
2279
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002280- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002281 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2282 is called.
2283
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002284- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2285 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2286 interpreter was compiled.
2287
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002288- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2289 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2290 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002291 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002292 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2293 1, not 2.
2294
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002295- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2296 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2297 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2298 limit.
2299
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002300- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2301 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2302 bug #623464.
2303
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002304- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2305 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2306 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2307 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2308
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002309Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002310-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002311
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002312- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2313
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002314- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2315 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2316 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2317 with Python 2.3a2.
2318
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002319- os.path exposes getctime.
2320
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002321- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002322 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002323 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002324 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002325 unit tests of floating point results.
2326
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002327- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2328 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2329 has been increased.
2330
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002331- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2332 executed.
2333
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002334- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2335 postinstallation script.
2336
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002337- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2338 test the current module.
2339
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002340- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002341 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2342 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2343 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2344 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2345
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002346- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002347 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002348 Ward's Optik package.
2349
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002350- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2351 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2352 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2353 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2354
2355- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2356 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002357 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002358
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002359- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2360 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2361 shelf are binary pickles.
2362
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002363- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2364 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2365
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002366- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2367 modules are iterators now.
2368
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002369- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2370 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2371 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2372 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2373 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2374 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002375
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002376- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2377 with their entity value.
2378
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002379- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2380
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002381- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2382 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002383
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002384- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2385 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002386 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002387
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002388- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2389 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2390 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2391 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2392 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2393 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2394 main():
2395
2396 import locale
2397 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2398
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002399- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2400 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2401
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002402- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2403 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2404 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2405 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2406 to the new standard.
2407
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002408- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2409 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2410 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2411 an extension to the database.
2412
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002413- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2414 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2415 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2416 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002417 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002418
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002419- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002420 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002421
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002422- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2423 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2424 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2425 bounded integers.
2426
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002427- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2428 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2429 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2430 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2431 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2432 in existence.
2433
2434 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2435 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2436 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2437 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2438 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2439 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2440
2441 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2442 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2443 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2444 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2445
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002446- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2447 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2448 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2449
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002450- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2451
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002452- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2453 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2454 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2455 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2456
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002457- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2458 argument.
2459
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002460- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2461 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2462 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2463 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2464 [SF patch 560794].
2465
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002466- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2467 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2468 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002469 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2470 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2471 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002472
2473- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2474 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002475
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002476- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2477 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2478 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2479 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002480
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002481- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2482 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2483 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2484 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2485 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2486
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002487- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002488
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002489- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2490
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002491- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2492 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2493 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2494 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2495 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2496 identical to None.
2497
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002498- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2499 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2500 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2501 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2502 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2503 results now.
2504
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002505- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2506 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2507
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002508- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2509 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2510 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2511 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2512 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2513 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2514 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2515 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2516
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002517- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2518
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002519- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2520 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2521
2522- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2523 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2524 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2525 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2526 and other systems.
2527
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002528- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2529 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2530 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2531 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 +00002532 work well with these.
2533
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002534- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2535
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002536- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002537 connections.
2538
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002539- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2540 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2541 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2542
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002543- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2544 sets
2545
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002546- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2547 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2548 name.
2549
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002550- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2551 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2552 passed in.
2553
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002554- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002555 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002556 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2557 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002558
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002559- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2560
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002561- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2562
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002563- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2564 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2565 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2566
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002567- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2568 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2569 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2570 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002571 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002572
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002573- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002574 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002575 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002576
2577- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2578 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2579 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2580
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002581- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002582 the value of its expression argument.
2583
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002584- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2585 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2586 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2587
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002588- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2589 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2590 skipstone browser was included.
2591
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002592- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2593 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2594
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002595Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002596-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002597
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002598- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2599 names in addition to accepting file names.
2600
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002601- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2602 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2603 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2604 still used and useful.)
2605
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002606- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2607 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2608 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2609 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002610
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002611- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2612 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2613 the generated binary.
2614
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002615Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002616-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002617
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002618- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2619
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002620- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2621 except in the hands of experts.
2622
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002623- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002624 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2625 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2626 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002627
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002628- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2629 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2630 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2631 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2632 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2633 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2634 builds.
2635
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002636- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2637 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2638 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2639 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2640 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2641 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2642 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2643 new type.
2644
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002645- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002646
2647 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2648 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2649 positive infinities.
2650
2651 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2652 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2653 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2654 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2655 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2656 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2657 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2658
2659 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2660
2661 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2662
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002663- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2664 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2665 size of the executable.
2666
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002667- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2668 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2669 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2670 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002671
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002672- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2673
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002674- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2675 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2676 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002677
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002678- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2679 well as Unix.
2680
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002681- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2682 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2683 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2684 modules in the README file for details.
2685
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002686C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002687-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002688
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002689- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2690 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002691 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002692 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002693 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002694
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002695- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2696 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2697 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2698 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2699 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2700 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002701 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002702 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2703 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2704 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2705 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2706 aligned.)
2707
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002708- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2709 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2710 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2711
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002712- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2713 level.
2714
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002715- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2716 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2717 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2718 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2719 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2720
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002721- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2722 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2723 code.
2724
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002725- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2726 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2727 adjusting for negative indices.
2728
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002729- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2730 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2731 object.
2732
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002733- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2734 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2735 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2736
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002737- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2738 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002739
2740- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2741
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002742- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2743 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2744 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2745 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2746
2747- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2748
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002749- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002750
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002751- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002752 without going through the buffer API.
2753
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002754- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002755
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002756- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2757 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2758 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2759 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2760
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002761- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2762 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2763
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002764- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002765 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2766
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002767New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002768-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002769
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002770- OpenVMS is now supported.
2771
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002772- AtheOS is now supported.
2773
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002774- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2775
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002776- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2777
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002778Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002779-----
2780
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002781- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2782 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2783 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002784
2785Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002786-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002787
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002788- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2789 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2790 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2791 bugs.
2792 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002793 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002794 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2795 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002796 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002797
2798- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002799 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002800
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002801- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2802 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2803
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002804- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2805 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002806 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002807 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2808
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002809- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2810 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2811 use files" uninstall option).
2812
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002813- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2814
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002815- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2816 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2817
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002818- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2819 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2820 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2821
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002822- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2823 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2824 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2825 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2826 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002827 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2828 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2829 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002830
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002831- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002832 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002833 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2834 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2835 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2836 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2837 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2838 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2839 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2840 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2841 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2842 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2843 work around.
2844
2845- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2846 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2847 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2848 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2849 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2850 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2851 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2852 specified with O_CREAT too).
2853
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002854Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002855----
2856
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002857- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002858
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002859- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2860 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2861 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2862
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002863- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2864 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2865 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2866
2867- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2868 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2869 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2870 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2871 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2872 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2873 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2874 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002875
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002876- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2877 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2878 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002879
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002880- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2881 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2882 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2883 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2884 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002885
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002886- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2887 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2888 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002889
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002890- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2891 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002892
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002893- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2894 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2895 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2896 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2897 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002898
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002899- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2900 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2901 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2902
2903- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2904 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2905 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002906
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002907- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2908 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2909 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2910 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002911 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002912
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002913- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2914 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002915
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002916- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2917 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002918
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002919- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002920 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002921 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2922 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002923
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002924
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002925What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002926===============================
2927
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002928*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2929
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002930Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002931--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002932
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002933- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2934 with a custom metaclass.
2935
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002936Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002937-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002938
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002939- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2940 are proxies.
2941
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002942Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002943-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002944
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002945- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2946 very short strings.
2947
2948- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2949 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2950 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2951 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2952 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2953
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002954Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002955-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002956
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002957- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2958 close or delete time).
2959
2960- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2961 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2962
2963- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2964
2965- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002966 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002967
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002968Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002969-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002970
2971Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002972-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002973
2974C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002975-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002976
2977New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002978-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002979
2980Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002981-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002982
2983Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002984-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002985
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002986- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2987
2988- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2989 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2990
2991- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2992 deleted at process exit time.
2993
2994- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2995 in backslash.
2996
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002997Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002998----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002999
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003000- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3001 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3002 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3003
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003004
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003005What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003006===========================
3007
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003008*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3009
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003010Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003011--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003012
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003013- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3014 been extensively updated. See
3015
3016 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3017
3018 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3019
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003020- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3021 deleted!
3022
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003023- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3024 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3025 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3026 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3027 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3028
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003029- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3030
3031 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3032 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3033
3034 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3035 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3036 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3037 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3038 supported anyway.
3039
3040 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3041 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3042
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003043- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3044 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3045 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3046 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3047 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003048
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003049- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3050 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3051 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3052
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003053Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003054-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003055
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003056- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3057 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3058 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3059 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3060 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3061 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003062 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3063 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3064 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3065 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003066
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003067- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3068 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3069 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3070
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003071Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003072-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003073
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003074- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3075
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003076Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003077-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003078
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003079- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3080 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3081 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3082 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3083 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3084 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3085
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003086- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3087
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003088- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3089
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003090- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3091
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003092- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3093 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3094 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3095
3096- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3097
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003098Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003099-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003100
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003101- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3102 off a search on Google.
3103
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003104Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003105-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003106
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003107- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3108 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3109 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3110 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3111 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3112 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3113 other platforms should do likewise.
3114
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003115- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3116 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3117 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3118
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003119C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003120-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003121
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003122- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3123 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3124 producing key-value pairs.
3125
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003126- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003127 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003128 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3129 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3130 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3131 previously went unchallenged.
3132
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003133New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003134-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003135
3136Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003137-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003138
3139Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003140-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003141
3142Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003143----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003144
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003145- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3146 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003147
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003148- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3149 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3150 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3151 home.
3152
3153
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003154What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003155===========================
3156
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003157*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3158
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003159Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003160--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003161
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003162- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3163 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003164
3165 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003166 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003167
3168 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3169 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003170 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003171 This needs to be documented.
3172
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003173- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3174 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3175
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003176- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3177 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3178 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3179
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003180- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3181 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3182
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003183- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3184 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3185 class forbids it).
3186
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003187- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3188 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3189 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3190
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003191- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3192
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003193Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003194-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003195
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003196- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3197 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003198 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003199
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003200- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3201 (like 1 + '').
3202
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003203Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003204-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003205
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003206- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3207 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3208 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3209 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003210 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003211 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3212
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003213- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3214 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3215 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3216 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3217
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003218- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3219 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003220 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3221 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3222 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003223
3224- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3225 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003226
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003227- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3228 bytes on its input.
3229
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003230Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003231-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003232
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003233- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003234 convenience function.
3235
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003236- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3237 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3238 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003239 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3240 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3241 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3242 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3243 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3244 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003245
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003246- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3247 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3248 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3249 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3250
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003251- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3252 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3253 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3254
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003255- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3256 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3257 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3258 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3259
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003260- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3261 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003262 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003263 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3264 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3265 new -l and -e options.
3266
3267- statcache is now deprecated.
3268
3269- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3270 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003271 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003272 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3273 time properly taken into account.
3274
3275- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3276 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3277 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3278 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3279
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003280Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003281-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003282
3283Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003284-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003285
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003286- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3287 is built with libdb3 if available.
3288
3289- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3290
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003291C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003292-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003293
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003294- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3295 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3296 PySequence_Size().
3297
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003298- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3299
3300- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3301 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3302 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3303
3304- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3305 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3306
3307- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3308 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3309
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003310New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003311-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003312
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003313- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3314 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3315
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003316- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3317 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3318
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003319- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3320
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003321Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003322-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003323
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003324- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3325 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3326
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003327Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003328-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003329
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003330Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003331----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003332
3333- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3334 removed completely in the next release.
3335
3336- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3337 OSX.
3338
3339- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3340 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3341
3342- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3343
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003344
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003345What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003346===========================
3347
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003348*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3349
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003350Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003351--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003352
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003353- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003354 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003355 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003356 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3357 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003358 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3359 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003360 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3361 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003362
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003363- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3364 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3365
3366- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3367 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3368
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003369Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003370-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003371
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003372- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3373 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3374 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3375 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3376 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3377 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3378 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3379 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3380
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003381- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3382 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3383 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3384 example).
3385
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003386- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003387 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003388 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003389 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003390
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003391- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3392 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3393 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003394 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003395
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003396- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3397 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3398 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3399 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3400 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3401 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3402
3403 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3404
3405 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3406
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003407Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003408-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003409
3410- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3411
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003412- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3413
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003414- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3415 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003416
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003417- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3418 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3419 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3420 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3421 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3422 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003423 attributes.
3424
3425- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3426 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3427 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003428
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003429- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3430 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3431 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003432
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003433- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3434 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3435 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003436 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3437 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3438
3439- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3440 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003441
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003442Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003443-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003444
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003445- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3446 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3447
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003448- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3449 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3450 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3451 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3452
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003453- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3454 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3455 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3456 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3457
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003458 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3459 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3460 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3461 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3462 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3463 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3464 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3465 without losing information).
3466
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003467- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003468 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3469 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3470 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3471 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3472 module).
3473
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003474 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003475 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3476 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3477 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3478 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003479
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003480- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003481 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3482 encoding.
3483
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003484- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3485 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3486
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003487- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003488 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3489
3490- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3491 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3492 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3493 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3494
3495- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3496
3497- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3498 ON, and OFF.
3499
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003500- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3501 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3502
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003503Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003504-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003505
3506- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3507 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3508 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003509
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003510- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3511 been added: -X and -E.
3512
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003513Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003514-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003515
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003516- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3517 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3518
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003519C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003520-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003521
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003522- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3523 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3524 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3525 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3526 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3527
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003528- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3529 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3530 as long) arguments.
3531
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003532- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3533 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3534 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3535 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3536 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3537 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3538
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003539- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3540 input.
3541
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003542New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003543-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003544
3545Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003546-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003547
3548Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003549-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003550
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003551- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3552 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3553 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3554
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003555- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3556 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3557 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003558 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003559
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003560 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3561 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3562 import signal
3563 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003564
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003565 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003566 while 1:
3567 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003568 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003569 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3570 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3571 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3572 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003573
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003574
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003575What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3576===========================
3577
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003578*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3579
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003580Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003581--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003582
3583- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3584 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3585 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3586
3587- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3588 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3589 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3590 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3591 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3592 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3593 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003594
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003595- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003596 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003597 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3598 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3599 associate a docstring with a property.
3600
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003601- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3602 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3603 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3604 other built-in object types.
3605
3606- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3607 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3608 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3609 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3610 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3611
3612- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3613 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3614
3615- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3616 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003617 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003618 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3619 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3620 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3621 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3622 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3623
3624- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3625 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3626 class.
3627
3628- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3629 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3630 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3631 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3632
3633- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3634 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3635 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3636 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3637
3638- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3639 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3640
3641- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3642 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3643 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3644 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3645 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003646 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003647 with the same value as s.
3648
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003649- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3650
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003651Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003652----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003653
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003654- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3655
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003656- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3657 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3658 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3659 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3660 objects.
3661
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003662- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3663 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003664 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3665 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3666
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003667- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3668 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3669 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3670
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003671Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003672-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003673
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003674- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3675 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3676 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3677 by the instances.
3678
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003679- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3680 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3681 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3682
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003683- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3684 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3685 before the entire comparison is complete.
3686
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003687- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3688 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3689 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3690
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003691- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3692 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3693 getwriter().
3694
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003695- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3696 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3697
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003698- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003699 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3700 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3701
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003702- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3703 iterable object.
3704
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003705- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3706 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003707
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003708- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3709 authentication.
3710
3711- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3712 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003713
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003714- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003715 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3716 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3717 a sample driver.)
3718
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003719Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003720-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003721
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003722- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3723 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3724 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3725 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3726 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3727 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3728 kernel has large file support.
3729
3730- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3731 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3732 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3733 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3734 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3735
3736- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3737 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3738 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3739
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003740C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003741-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003742
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003743- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3744 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3745
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003746New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003747-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003748
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003749- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3750 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3751
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003752Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003753-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003754
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003755- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3756 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3757 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3758 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3759 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3760
3761- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3762 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3763 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3764 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3765
3766- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3767 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3768
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003769Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003770-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003771
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003772- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003773 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3774 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003775
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003776
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003777What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3778===========================
3779
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003780*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3781
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003782Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003783----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003784
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003785- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3786 big to represent as a C double.
3787
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003788- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3789 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3790 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3791 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3792 restriction).
3793
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003794- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3795 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3796 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3797 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3798 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3799
3800 >>> dir([])
3801 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3802 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3803 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3804 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3805 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3806 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3807 'reverse', 'sort']
3808
3809 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3810
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003811- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003812 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3813 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3814 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3815 OverflowError exception.
3816
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003817- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003818 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003819 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3820 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3821 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3822 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3823 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003824 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003825 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3826 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3827
3828 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3829 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3830 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3831 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003832
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003833- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003834 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3835 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3836 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3837 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3838 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3839 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3840 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3841 once it is created.
3842
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003843- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3844 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3845 (key, value) pairs.
3846
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003847- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003848 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3849 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3850
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003851- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3852 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3853 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3854 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3855 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003856
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003857- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003858 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3859 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3860
3861 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3862
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003863- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003864 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3865
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003866Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003867-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003868
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003869- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003870 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3871 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003872
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003873- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3874 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3875 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3876 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3877 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3878 in this area anymore).
3879
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003880- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3881 threading.Timer.
3882
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003883- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3884 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3885
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003886- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003887 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3888
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003889- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003890 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3891 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3892 converted to Python longs.
3893
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003894- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003895 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3896
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003897- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3898 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3899 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3900
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003901Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003902-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003903
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003904- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3905 division operators as per PEP 238.
3906
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003907Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003908-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003909
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003910- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3911 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3912 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3913 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3914
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003915C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003916-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003917
3918- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003919
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003920- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3921 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003922 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003923
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003924 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3925 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003926 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003927 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003928
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003929- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003930 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3931 module:
3932
3933 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003934
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003935 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3936 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003937
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003938 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3939 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003940
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003941 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3942
3943 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3944
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003945- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003946 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3947 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3948 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003949
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003950New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003951-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003952
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003953- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3954 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3955 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3956 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3957 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003958
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003959Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003960-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003961
3962Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003963-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003964
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003965- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3966 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3967 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3968 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003969 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3970 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3971 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3972 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3973 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003974
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003975- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003976 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3977
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003978
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003979What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3980===========================
3981
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003982*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3983
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003984Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003985-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003986
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003987- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3988 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3989
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003990- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3991 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3992 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003993
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003994- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3995 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3996 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3997 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003998
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003999- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4000
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004001- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004002
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004003Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004004-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004005
4006- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004007 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004008 the module docstring for details.
4009
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004010Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004011-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004012
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004013- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004014 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4015 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4016 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004017
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004018- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4019 Nick Mathewson.
4020
4021Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004022----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004023
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004024- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4025 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4026 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4027 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4028 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4029 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4030 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4031 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4032
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004033- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4034 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4035 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4036 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4037
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004038- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4039 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4040 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4041 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4042 come a long way).
4043
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004044- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4045 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4046 write filters for these warnings).
4047
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004048- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4049 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4050 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4051 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4052 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4053
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004054- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4055 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4056 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4057 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4058 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4059 older distribution.
4060
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004061Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004062-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004063
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004064- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4065 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004066 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004067
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004068- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4069 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4070 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4071
4072- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4073
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004074- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4075
4076- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4077
4078- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4079
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004080- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004081
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004082- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4083
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004084New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004085-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004086
4087C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004088-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004089
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004090- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4091 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4092 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4093 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4094 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4095 against buffer overruns.
4096
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004097- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004098 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4099 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004100 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4101 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4102 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4103
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004104- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4105 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4106 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4107 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4108 deprecated.
4109
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004110Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004111-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004112
4113- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4114 relevant is found.
4115
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004116
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004117What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004118===========================
4119
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004120*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4121
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004122Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004124
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004125- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4126 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4127 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4128 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4129 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4130 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4131 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4132 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004133 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004134 repaired.
4135
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004136- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004137 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004138 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4139 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4140 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4141 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4142 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4143 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4144 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4145 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4146
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004147- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4148 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4149 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4150 leading BMO character).
4151
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004152- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4153 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4154 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4155
4156 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4157 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4158 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004159
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004160 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4161 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4162 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4163 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4164 for various simple to use conversions.
4165
4166 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4167 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4168
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004169 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4170 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4171 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4172 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4173 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4174 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4175 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4176 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4177 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4178 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4179 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4180 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4181 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4182 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4183 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004184
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004185- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4186 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4187 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004188 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004189 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004190
4191 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004192 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4193 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4194 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4195 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4196 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004197 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4198 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004199
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004200 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4201 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4202 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004203 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004204
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004205- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4206 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4207 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4208 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4209 floating arithmetic,
4210
4211 x = 9007199254740992.0
4212 print long(x)
4213
4214 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4215 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4216 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4217 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4218 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4219 functions are of good quality).
4220
4221 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4222 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4223 algorithms to break.
4224
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004225- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4226 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4227 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4228 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4229 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4230 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4231 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4232 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4233 order.
4234
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004235- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4236 operation along the most common code paths.
4237
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004238- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4239 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4240
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004241- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4242 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4243 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4244 {}.update(UserDict())
4245
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004246- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4247 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4248 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4249 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4250 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4251 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4252 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4253 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4254
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004255- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004256 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004258 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004259 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4260 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004261 join() method of strings
4262 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004263 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4264 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004265 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004266 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004267
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004268- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4269 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4270
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004271- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4272 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4273
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004274- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4275 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4276 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4277 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4278
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004279- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4280 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004281 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004282 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4283 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004284
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004285- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4286
4287
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004288Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004289-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004290
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004291- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004292 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004293 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4294 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4295
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004296- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4297 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4298
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004299- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4300 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4301 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4302 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4303
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004304- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4305 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4306 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4307
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004308- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4309
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004310- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4311
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004312- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4313 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4314 that are still imported into string.py).
4315
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004316- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4317
4318- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4319 Now it does.
4320
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004321- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4322
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004323- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4324 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4325 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4326 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4327 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004328 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4329 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004330
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004331- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4332 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4333 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4334 'help(object)'.
4335
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004336Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004338
4339- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004340 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004341 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4342 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4343
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004344- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004345 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4346 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004347
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004348C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004349-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004350
4351- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4352 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353
4354----
4355
4356**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**