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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
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000015- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
16 functions is now writable.
17
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000018- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
19 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
20 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
21 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
22
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000023- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
24 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
25 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
26 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
27 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000028
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000029- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
30 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
31
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000032Extension modules
33-----------------
34
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000035- Added socket.socketpair().
36
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000037Library
38-------
39
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000040- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
41 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
42 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
43 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
44 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
45 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
46 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
47 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
48 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
49 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
50 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
51 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
52 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
53
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000054Tools/Demos
55-----------
56
57Build
58-----
59
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +000060- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
61 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
62
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000063C API
64-----
65
66Documentation
67-------------
68
69New platforms
70-------------
71
72Tests
73-----
74
75Windows
76-------
77
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +000078- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
79 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
80 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
81 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
82 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
83 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
84 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
85 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
86 the problem.
87
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000088Mac
89---
90
91
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000092What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
93=================================
94
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +000095*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000096
97Core and builtins
98-----------------
99
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000100- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
101 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
102 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
103 sensitive code.
104
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000105- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
106 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
107 @staticmethod
108 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000109 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000110
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000111- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
112 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
113 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
114 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
115 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
116 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
117 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
118 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
119 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
120 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
121 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
122
123 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
124 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
125 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
126 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
127 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
128 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
129 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
130
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000131- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
132 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
133
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000134- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000135 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000136
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000137- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000138 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000139 which was missing for no apparent reason.
140
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000141- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000142 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
143 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
144
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000145- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
146 types that support garbage collection.
147
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000148- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
149
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000150- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
151 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
152 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
153 Jython.
154
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000155- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
156
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000157- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
158 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
159
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000160- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
161 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
162 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000163
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000164- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
165 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
166 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
167
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000168Extension modules
169-----------------
170
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000171- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
172
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000173Library
174-------
175
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000176- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
177 TIS-620
178
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000179- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
180 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
181 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
182 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
183 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
184 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
185 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
186 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
187 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
188 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
189
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000190- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
191
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000192- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
193 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
194 same as when the argument is omitted).
195 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
196
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000197- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
198
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000199- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
200 schemes are offered.
201
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000202- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
203
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000204- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
205 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
206 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
207
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000208- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
209
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000210- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
211 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
212
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000213- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
214 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
215 when dummy_threading is being used.
216
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000217- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
218 from a tarfile.
219
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000220- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000221 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000222
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000223- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
224 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
225 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
226 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
227
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000228- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
229 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
230
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000231- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
232 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
233 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
234 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
235 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
236 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
237 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
238 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
239 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
240 by some other method in progress).
241
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000242- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
243 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
244 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000245
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000246- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
247
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000248- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
249 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
250 AM Kuchling.
251
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000252- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
253 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
254 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
255
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000256- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
257 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
258 instead of unsigned.
259
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000260- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000261 no longer part of the public API.
262
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000263- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
264 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
265 string methods of the same name).
266
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000267- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
268 SF patch 982681.
269
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000270- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000271 SF patch 945642.
272
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000273- doctest unittest integration improvements:
274
275 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
276
277 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
278 DocTestSuites.
279
280- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
281 that provide thread-local data.
282
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000283- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
284 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
285
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000286- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
287
288- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
289 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
290 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
291
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000292- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
293
294 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
295 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
296 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000297
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000298 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
299 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
300 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
301 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
302
303 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
304 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
305
306 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
307 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
308 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
309 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
310
311 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
312 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
313 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
314 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
315 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
316
317 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
318 wrapping help output.
319
320 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
321 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
322 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000323
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000324C API
325-----
326
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000327- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
328 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
329 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
330 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
331 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
332 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
333 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
334 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
335 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
336 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
337 its visible semantics have not changed.
338
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000339- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
340 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
341
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000342Documentation
343-------------
344
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000345- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000346
347 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000348 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000349
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000350 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000351
352 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
353
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000354- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000355
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000356Tests
357-----
358
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000359- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000360 platforms that use the Makefile.
361
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000362- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
363 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
364 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
365
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000366
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000367What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
368=================================
369
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000370*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000371
372Core and builtins
373-----------------
374
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000375- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
376 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
377 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
378 objects now (one object instead of three).
379
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000380- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
381 Windows DLLs.
382
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000383- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
384 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000385
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000386- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
387 a new .pyc magic.
388
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000389- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
390 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
391 be there.
392
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000393- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
394 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
395 the LC_NUMERIC category.
396
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000397- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
398 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
399 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
400
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000401- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
402
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000403- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
404 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
405 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000406
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000407- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
408 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
409
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000410- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
411
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000412- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000413 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000414
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000415- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
416
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000417- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
418
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000419- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
420 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
421
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000422- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
423 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
424 Fixes bug #858016 .
425
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000426- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
427 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
428 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
429
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000430- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
431 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
432 improves their performance (about 35%).
433
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000434- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
435 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
436 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
437
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000438- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
439 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
440 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
441 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
442
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000443- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
444 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
445 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
446 length is not known).
447
448- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
449 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000450 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
451 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000452 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
453
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000454- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
455 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
456
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000457- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
458 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
459 keyword arguments.
460
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000461- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
462 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
463 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
464
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000465- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
466 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
467 cases.
468
469- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
470 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
471 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
472 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
473 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
474 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
475 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
476 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
477 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
478 a release build.
479
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000480- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
481 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
482
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000483- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000484 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000485
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000486- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
487 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
488 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
489 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
490 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
491 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
492 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
493 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
494 destroyed.
495
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000496- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
497 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
498 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
499 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
500 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
501 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
502 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
503 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
504
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000505- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
506 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
507 character other than a space.
508
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000509- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
510 by the function object or by the method object, the function
511 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
512 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
513 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
514 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
515 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
516 attributes with the same name.
517
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000518- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
519 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
520 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
521 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
522 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
523 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
524 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
525 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
526 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
527 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
528 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
529 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
530 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
531 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000532
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000533- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
534 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
535 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
536 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
537 This has been repaired.
538
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000539- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
540
541- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
542
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000543- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
544 over a sequence.
545
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000546- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000547 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000548
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000549- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
550
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000551- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
552 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
553 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
554 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
555 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
556 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
557 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
558 records with equal keys is unchanged).
559
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000560- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
561 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
562 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
563
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000564- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
565 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
566 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
567 freelist.
568
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000569- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
570 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
571
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000572- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
573 number.
574
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000575- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
576 a TypeError exception.
577
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000578- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
579 820195.
580
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000581- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
582 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
583 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
584
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000585- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000586 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
587 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000588
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000589- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
590 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
591 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
592
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000593- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
594 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000595 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000596
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000597- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000598 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
599 the first call.
600
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000601
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000602Extension modules
603-----------------
604
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000605- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
606 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
607
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000608- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
609 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
610 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
611 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
612 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
613 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
614 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000615
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000616- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
617
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000618- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
619
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000620- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
621 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
622
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000623- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
624 fewer false positives.
625
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000626- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
627 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
628
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000629- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000630 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
631
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000632- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000633 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000634 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
635 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
636 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000637
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000638- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
639 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
640 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
641 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
642
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000643- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
644 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
645 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
646 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
647 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
648 #897625.
649
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000650- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
651 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
652
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000653- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
654 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
655 and pops on either side of the deque.
656
657- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
658 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
659
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000660- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
661 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
662 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
663 other functions that expect a function argument.
664
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000665- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
666
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000667- os.getsid was added.
668
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000669- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
670 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
671 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
672
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000673- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
674
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000675- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
676
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000677- readline.clear_history was added.
678
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000679- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
680
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000681- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
682
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000683- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
684
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000685- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
686
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000687- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
688
689- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
690
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000691- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
692
693- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
694
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000695- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
696 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
697 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
698
699- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
700 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
701 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
702 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
703 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
704 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
705 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
706
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000707- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
708 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
709 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
710 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000711
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000712- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000713 iterators from a single iterable.
714
715- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
716 of raising a TypeError exception.
717
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000718- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
719 as parameter.
720
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000721Library
722-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000723
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000724- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
725 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
726 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000727
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000728- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
729 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
730 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000731
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000732- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000733
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000734- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
735 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000736
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000737- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
738 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
739
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000740- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
741
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000742- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000743 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000744
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000745- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
746 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
747
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000748- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
749
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000750- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
751 on cygwin and mingw32.
752
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000753- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
754
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000755- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
756 module.
757
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000758- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
759 installation scheme for all platforms.
760
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000761- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000762 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000763
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000764- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
765 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
766 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
767
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000768- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
769 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
770 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
771
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000772- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
773
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000774- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
775
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000776- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
777 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
778
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000779- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
780 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
781 type pattern with the same value exists.
782
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000783- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
784 when run from the command prompt).
785
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000786- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
787 not taken into consideration when caching value.
788
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000789- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
790 default sort).
791
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000792- Added global runctx function to profile module
793
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000794- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
795
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000796- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
797
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000798- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
799
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000800- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000801 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
802 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
803 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
804 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
805 accordingly.
806
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000807- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
808 decoding standards.
809
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000810- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
811 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
812 called for all requests.
813
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000814- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
815 they are passed to the compiler.
816
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000817- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
818 indent, width and depth.
819
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000820- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
821 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
822
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000823- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
824 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
825
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000826- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
827
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000828- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
829
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000830- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
831
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000832- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
833 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
834
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000835- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000836 for better performance.
837
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000838- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000839
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000840- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
841 a string).
842
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000843- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
844
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000845- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
846
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000847- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
848
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000849- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
850
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000851- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
852 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
853 list of fieldnames.
854
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000855- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
856 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
857
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000858- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
859
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000860- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
861 empty lists.
862
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000863- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
864 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
865 and shelves.
866
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000867- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
868 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
869
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000870- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000871 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
872 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000873
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000874- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
875 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000876 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000877
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000878- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000879 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
880 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
881
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000882- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
883 and removed in Py2.4.
884
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000885- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
886
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000887- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
888
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000889Tools/Demos
890-----------
891
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000892- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
893 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
894
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000895- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
896
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000897- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
898 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
899 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
900 destination in situations where both files are given.
901
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000902- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
903 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
904 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
905 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
906
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000907- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
908
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000909- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
910 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
911 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
912 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
913 now.
914
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000915- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
916 in effect
917
918- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
919 C-c C-h
920
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000921- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
922 -d option was given.
923
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000924Build
925-----
926
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000927- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
928 build under OS X.
929
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000930- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
931 --enable-profiling.
932
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000933- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
934 is configured --with-tsc.
935
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000936- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
937 on AMD64.
938
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000939- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
940 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
941
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000942- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
943 removed.
944
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000945- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
946 supported (see PEP 11).
947
948- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
949
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000950- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
951
952- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
953 (see PEP 11).
954
955- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
956 sizeof(char) must be 1.
957
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000958C API
959-----
960
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000961- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
962 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
963 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
964
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000965- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
966 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
967 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
968 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
969
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000970- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
971 generator objects.
972
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000973- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
974 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000975 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
976 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000977
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000978- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
979 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
980
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000981- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
982 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
983 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
984 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
985 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
986
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000987- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
988 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
989 about 10% faster.
990
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000991- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
992 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
993
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000994- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
995 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
996 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
997 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
998
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000999Windows
1000-------
1001
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001002- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1003 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1004 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1005 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1006
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001007- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1008 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1009 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1010
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001011
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001012What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1013===============================
1014
1015*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1016
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001017IDLE
1018----
1019
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001020- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1021 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1022 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1023 context-menu actions.
1024
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001025- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1026 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1027 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1028 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1029 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1030 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1031 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1032 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1033 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1034
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001035
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001036What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1037=============================================
1038
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001039*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001040
1041Core and builtins
1042-----------------
1043
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001044- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001045 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001046 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1047
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001048Extension modules
1049-----------------
1050
1051- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1052 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1053 than once. This has been fixed.
1054
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001055- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1056 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1057 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1058 call.
1059
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001060- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1061
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001062Library
1063-------
1064
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001065- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1066 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1067
1068- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1069 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1070 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1071 restored.
1072
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001073IDLE
1074----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001075
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001076- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001077
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001078Build
1079-----
1080
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001081- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1082 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1083
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001084C API
1085-----
1086
1087Windows
1088-------
1089
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001090- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1091 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1092
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001093- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1094
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001095Mac
1096---
1097
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001098- Various fixes to pimp.
1099
1100- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1101
1102- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1103 more problems than it solves.
1104
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001105
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001106What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1107=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001108
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001109*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1110
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001111Core and builtins
1112-----------------
1113
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001114- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1115 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1116
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001117- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1118 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001119 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001120
1121- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1122 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1123 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001124 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001125
1126- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1127 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001128
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001129- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1130 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1131 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1132
1133- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001134 770247.
1135
1136- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001137
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001138Extension modules
1139-----------------
1140
1141- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1142 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1143
1144- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1145
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001146- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1147
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001148- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1149 contained within the _strptime module.
1150
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001151- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1152 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1153
1154- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001155 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1156
1157- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1158 the find_class attribute, if present.
1159
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001160- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001161
1162 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1163 (SF bug 763298).
1164
1165 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001166 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1167 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1168 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001169
1170 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1171
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001172Library
1173-------
1174
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001175- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1176
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001177- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1178 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1179 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1180 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1181 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1182 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1183 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1184 or Tester().
1185
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001186- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1187 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1188 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1189 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1190 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1191 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1192 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1193 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1194 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001195
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001196 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001197
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001198- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1199 weren't before was an oversight.
1200
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001201- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1202 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1203
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001204- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1205 when there are no lines.
1206
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001207- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1208 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1209
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001210- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1211 to child processes.
1212
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001213- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1214
1215- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1216
1217- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1218 xmlrpclib.
1219
1220- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1221 responses.
1222
1223- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1224 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1225
1226- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1227 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1228 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1229
1230- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1231 used as patterns.
1232
1233- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1234 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1235 than Tk 8.3.
1236
1237- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1238
1239- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001240
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001241Tools/Demos
1242-----------
1243
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001244- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1245
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001246- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1247
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001248- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001249
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001250Build
1251-----
1252
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001253- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1254
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001255- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1256
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001257- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1258 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001259
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001260- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1261 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1262 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001263
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001264C API
1265-----
1266
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001267- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1268 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1269
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001270Windows
1271-------
1272
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001273- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1274 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1275 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1276 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1277 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1278 Python exception ::
1279
1280 thread.error: can't start new thread
1281
1282 is raised now.
1283
1284- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1285 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1286 instead of from DLL teardown.
1287
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001288Mac
1289---
1290
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001291- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001292 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001293 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1294 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1295 the executable in the bundle.
1296
1297- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001298
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001299- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1300
1301- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1302 on Panther.
1303
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001304What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1305================================
1306
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001307*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001308
1309Core and builtins
1310-----------------
1311
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001312- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1313 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1314 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1315 with the -i option.
1316
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001317- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1318 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1319
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001320- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1321 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1322
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001323- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1324 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1325 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1326 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1327 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1328 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1329 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1330 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1331 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1332 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1333 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1334 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1335 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001336
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001337- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1338 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1339 embedded in a lambda expression.
1340
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001341- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1342 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1343 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1344 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1345 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1346
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001347- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1348 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1349 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1350
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001351- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1352 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1353
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001354- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1355 It's writable again.
1356
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001357- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1358 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1359 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001360 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001361
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001362- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1363 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1364 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1365
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001366Extension modules
1367-----------------
1368
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001369- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1370 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1371
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001372- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1373 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1374 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1375 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1376
1377- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1378 collection.
1379
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001380- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1381 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1382 unique within a single program run.
1383
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001384- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1385 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1386
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001387- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1388 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1389
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001390- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1391 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001392
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001393- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1394
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001395- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1396 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1397
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001398- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1399 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1400 for many BSD-derived systems.
1401
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001402
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001403Library
1404-------
1405
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001406- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1407 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1408 primary ones:
1409
1410 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1411 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1412 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1413
1414 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1415 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1416 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1417 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1418 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1419 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1420
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001421- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1422 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1423 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1424 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1425 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1426 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1427 argument.
1428
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001429- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1430 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1431 in the archive.
1432
1433- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1434 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1435
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001436- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1437 569574).
1438
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001439- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1440 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1441 no more.
1442
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001443- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1444 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1445 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1446 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1447 code coverage.
1448
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001449- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1450 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1451 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001452 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1453 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001454
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001455- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1456 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1457 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001458 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001459
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001460- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1461
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001462- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1463 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1464 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1465 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1466
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001467- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1468 handling.
1469
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001470- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1471 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1472
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001473- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1474 in socket.py.
1475
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001476- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1477
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001478- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1479 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1480 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1481 opener with proxy support.
1482
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001483- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1484
1485- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1486
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001487Tools/Demos
1488-----------
1489
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001490- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1491
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001492- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1493
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001494- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1495 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001496
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001497- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1498 files.
1499
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001500Build
1501-----
1502
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001503- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001504 different root directory.
1505
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001506C API
1507-----
1508
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001509- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1510 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1511 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1512 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1513 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1514 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1515 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1516 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1517 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1518 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1519
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001520- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1521 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1522 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1523 from Python.
1524
1525
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001526New platforms
1527-------------
1528
1529None this time.
1530
1531Tests
1532-----
1533
1534- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1535 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1536
1537Windows
1538-------
1539
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001540- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1541
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001542- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1543 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1544 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1545 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1546 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1547 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1548 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1549 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1550 that's what it's for.
1551
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001552Mac
1553---
1554
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001555- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1556 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1557 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1558 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001559- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1560 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1561- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001562
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001563SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1564------------------------------------
1565
1566430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1567598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1568622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1569661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1570683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1571697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1572713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1573724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1574727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1575729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1576730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1577731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1578732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1579733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1580735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1581740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1582744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1583745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1584747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1585749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1586751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1587753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1588755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1589757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1590760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1591
1592
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001593What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1594================================
1595
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001596*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001597
1598Core and builtins
1599-----------------
1600
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001601- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1602 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1603
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001604- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1605 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1606 and cannot be strings).
1607
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001608- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1609 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1610 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1611 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1612
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001613- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1614 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1615 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1616 Python itself.
1617
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001618- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1619 the referenced object, if it has one.
1620
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001621- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1622 the thread started at
1623 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1624
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001625- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1626 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1627 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1628 placed on a list index.
1629
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001630- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1631 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1632 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1633 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1634
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001635- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1636 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1637 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1638 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1639 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1640 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1641 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1642
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001643- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1644 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1645 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1646 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1647 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1648
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001649- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1650 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001651
1652- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1653 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1654 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1655 #693195.)
1656
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001657- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1658 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001659
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001660- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001661 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001662 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1663 interpreter executions, would fail.
1664
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001665- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001666 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001667 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001668
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001669Extension modules
1670-----------------
1671
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001672- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1673 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1674 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1675 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1676
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001677- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1678 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1679
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001680- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1681 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1682 and Greg Chapman.)
1683
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001684- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1685 recursively.
1686
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001687- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001688 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1689 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1690 leaks.
1691
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001692- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1693
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001694- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1695 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1696 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1697 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1698 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1699 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1700 #705836.
1701
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001702- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001703 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1704
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001705- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1706 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1707 See SF bug #692416.
1708
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001709- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1710 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1711
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001712- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1713 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1714 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001715
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001716- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001717 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1718 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1719
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001720- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1721 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1722 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1723 timeouts to work properly.
1724
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001725Library
1726-------
1727
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001728- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1729 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1730 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1731 future release.
1732
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001733- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1734 for querying platform dependent features.
1735
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001736- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001737
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001738- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1739 pickle protocol versions.
1740
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001741- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1742 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1743 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1744
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001745- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1746
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001747- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1748 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1749 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1750 modules.
1751
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001752- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1753 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1754 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1755
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001756- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1757 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1758
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001759- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1760 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1761 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1762
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001763- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001764 MS Office extensions.
1765
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001766- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1767 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1768
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001769- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1770 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1771
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001772- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1773 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1774 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1775 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1776 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1777 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1778
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001779- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1780 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1781 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001782
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001783- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1784 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1785 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1786
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001787- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1788
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001789- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1790 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1791 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1792
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001793Tools/Demos
1794-----------
1795
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001796- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1797 See the module docstring for details.
1798
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001799Build
1800-----
1801
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001802- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1803 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001804
1805C API
1806-----
1807
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001808- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1809
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001810- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1811 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1812 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1813
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001814- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1815 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001816
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001817 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1818 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1819 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001820
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001821- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001822 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1823
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001824- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1825 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1826 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001827
1828New platforms
1829-------------
1830
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001831None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001832
1833Tests
1834-----
1835
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001836- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1837 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001838
1839Windows
1840-------
1841
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001842- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1843 function.
1844
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001845- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1846 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001847
1848Mac
1849---
1850
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001851- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1852 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001853
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001854- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1855 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001856
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001857- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1858 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1859 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001860
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001861- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001862 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1863 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001864
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001865- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1866 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001867
1868
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001869What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1870=================================
1871
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001872*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001873
1874Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001875-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001876
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001877- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1878 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1879 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1880
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001881- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1882 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1883 (SF patch #664376.)
1884
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001885- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1886 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1887 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1888 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1889 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1890 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001891 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001892
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001893- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1894 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1895 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1896 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001897 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001898
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001899- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1900 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1901 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1902 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1903 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1904 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1905 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1906 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1907 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1908 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1909 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1910
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001911- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1912 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1913 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1914 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1915 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1916 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1917
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001918- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1919 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1920
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001921- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1922 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1923 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1924 case.)
1925
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001926- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1927 passed as unicode strings.
1928
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001929- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1930 See SF bug #683467.
1931
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001932- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1933 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1934
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001935- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1936
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001937- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1938
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001939- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1940 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1941 arguments.
1942
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001943- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1944 See SF bug #667147.
1945
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001946- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001947 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001948 See SF bug #676155.
1949
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001950- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001951 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001952 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1953 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1954 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1955 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1956 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1957 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001958
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001959Extension modules
1960-----------------
1961
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001962- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1963 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1964 tp_as_number pointer.
1965
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001966- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1967 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1968 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1969 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1970 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1971
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001972- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1973
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001974- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1975
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001976- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001977 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001978 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1979 patch #678531.)
1980
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001981- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1982 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1983
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001984- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1985 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1986
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001987- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1988
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001989- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1990 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1991 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1992
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001993- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1994
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001995- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1996 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1997
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001998- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001999
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002000- datetime changes:
2001
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002002 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2003
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002004 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2005 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2006 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2007 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2008 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2009 now.
2010
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002011 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002012 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2013 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002014
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002015 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002016 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002017 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2018 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2019 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2020 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002021
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002022 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2023 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2024 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002025 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2026
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002027 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2028 by a later example coded by Guido.
2029
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002030 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002031 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2032 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2033 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002034 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2035 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2036
2037 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2038 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2039 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2040 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2041 tzinfo subclass instance.
2042
2043 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2044 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2045 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2046 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2047 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2048 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2049 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2050 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002051
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002052 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2053 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2054 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2055 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2056 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002057 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2058
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002059 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002060
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002061 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2062 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2063 as a naive datetime object.
2064
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002065 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2066 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2067 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2068
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002069 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2070 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2071 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2072 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2073 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2074 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2075 comparison.
2076
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002077 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2078 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2079 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2080 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002081 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002082
2083 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002084
2085 and ::
2086
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002087 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2088
2089 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2090 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2091 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2092 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2093
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002094 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2095 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2096 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2097 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2098 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2099
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002100 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2101 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002102 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2103 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002104
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002105Library
2106-------
2107
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002108- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2109 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2110
2111- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2112 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2113 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2114 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2115 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2116 See PEP 307 for details.
2117
2118- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2119 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2120
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002121- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2122 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002123 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002124 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2125 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002126 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002127
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002128- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2129 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2130
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002131- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2132 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2133 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2134
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002135- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2136
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002137- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2138 exception.
2139
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002140- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2141 class.
2142
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002143- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2144 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2145 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2146
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002147- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2148 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2149
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002150- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002151 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2152 See SF bug #659228.
2153
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002154- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2155 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2156 See SF patch #651082.
2157
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002158- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002159
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002160- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2161 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2162
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002163- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002164 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002165
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002166- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2167 DOS paths from other platforms.
2168
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002169Tools/Demos
2170-----------
2171
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002172- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2173 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2174 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2175 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2176 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2177 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2178 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2179 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2180 example:
2181
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002182 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2183 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002184
2185 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2186
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002187
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002188Build
2189-----
2190
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002191- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2192 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2193 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002194 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2195
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002196 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2197
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002198- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2199 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2200 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2201 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2202 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2203 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2204 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2205 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2206 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2207
2208- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2209 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2210 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2211 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2212
2213- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2214 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2215
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002216C API
2217-----
2218
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002219- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2220 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002221
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002222- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2223 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2224 tp_as_number pointer.
2225
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002226- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2227 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2228 (SF #681367)
2229
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002230- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2231 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2232 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2233 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002234
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002235Tests
2236-----
2237
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002238- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002239 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2240 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2241 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2242 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2243 pydoc.)
2244
2245- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2246
2247- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002248
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002249Windows
2250-------
2251
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002252- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2253 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2254 time).
2255
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002256- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2257 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2258
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002259- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2260 release without strong cryptography.
2261
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002262- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002263 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002264
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002265- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2266 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2267
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002268Mac
2269---
2270
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002271- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2272 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002273
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002274- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2275 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2276 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002277
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002278- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2279 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002280
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002281- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2282 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2283 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2284 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002285
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002286- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002287 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2288 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2289 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002290
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002291
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002292What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002293=================================
2294
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002295*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002296
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002297Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002298--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002299
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002300- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2301
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002302- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2303 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002304 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002305 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002306 a different meaning than before.
2307
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002308- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002309 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002310 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002311
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002312- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002313 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002314 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002315
2316- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2317 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2318 and deallocation.
2319
2320- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2321 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2322
2323- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2324 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2325 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2326 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2327 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2328
2329- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2330 now detected by the garbage collector.
2331
2332- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2333 [SF bug 519621]
2334
2335- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2336 identifier.
2337
2338- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2339 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2340 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2341 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2342 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2343 [SF bug 563060]
2344
2345- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2346 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2347 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2348 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2349 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2350
2351- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2352 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2353 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2354
2355- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2356
2357- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2358 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2359 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2360 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2361 state of the slots would be lost.)
2362
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002363Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002364-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002365
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002366- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002367 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2368 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2369 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2370 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002371 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2372 Jython 2.1.
2373
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002374- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002375 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002376 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2377 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2378 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2379 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2380 these, see PEP 302.
2381
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002382- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2383 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2384 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2385
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002386- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2387 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2388 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2389
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002390- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2391 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2392 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2393
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002394- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2395 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2396 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2397 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2398 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2399 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2400 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2401 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2402 releases or implementations.
2403
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002404- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002405 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2406 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002407
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002408- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2409 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2410
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002411- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2412 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2413 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2414
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002415- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2416 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2417
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002418- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2419 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002420 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2421 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002422
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002423- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2424 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2425 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2426 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2427 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2428
2429 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2430 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2431 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2432 pattern.
2433
2434 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2435 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2436 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2437 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2438
2439 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2440 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2441 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2442 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2443 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2444 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2445
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002446- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2447 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2448 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2449 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2450 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2451 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2452 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2453 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002454
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002455- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2456 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2457 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2458 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2459 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002460 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2461 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2462 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2463 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2464 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2465 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2466 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002467
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002468- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2469 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2470
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002471- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2472 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2473 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2474 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2475 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2476 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2477 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2478 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2479 to Zack Weinberg!
2480
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002481- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2482 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2483 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2484 type. This has been fixed now.
2485
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002486- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2487 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2488 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2489
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002490- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2491 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2492 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2493 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2494 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2495 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2496 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2497 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002498 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002499
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002500- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2501 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2502 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002503
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002504- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2505 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2506 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2507 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2508 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2509 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2510 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2511 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002512 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002513 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2514 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2515
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002516- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2517 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2518 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2519 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2520 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2521 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2522 this.)
2523
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002524- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2525 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002526 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002527 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002528 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2529 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002530 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2531 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002532
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002533- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2534 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2535 currently running.
2536
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002537- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2538 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2539 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2540 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2541
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002542- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2543 as directory names.
2544
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002545- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2546 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2547
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002548- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2549 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2550
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002551- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002552 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2553 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002554
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002555- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2556 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2557 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2558 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2559 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2560
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002561- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2562 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2563 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2564 removed.
2565
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002566- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2567 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2568 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2569
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002570- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2571 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2572 to __debug__.
2573
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002574- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2575 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2576 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2577
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002578- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2579 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2580 deprecated now.
2581
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002582- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2583 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2584 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002585
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002586- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2587 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2588 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2589 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2590 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002591
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002592- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2593 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2594
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002595- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2596 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2597 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002598 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002599 is backward compatible.
2600
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002601- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2602 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2603 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2604 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2605 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2606
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002607- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2608 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2609 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2610 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2611 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2612 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002613
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002614- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2615 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2616
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002617- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2618 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2619
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002620- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2621 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2622 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2623 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2624 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2625
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002626- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2627 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2628 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2629
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002630- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002631 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2632
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002633- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2634 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2635 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002636
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002637- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2638 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2639
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002640- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2641 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2642 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2643
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002644- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2645
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002646Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002647-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002648
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002649- Added three operators to the operator module:
2650 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2651 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2652 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2653
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002654- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2655
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002656- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2657 archives.
2658
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002659- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2660 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2661 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2662
2663 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2664
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002665- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2666 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2667 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002668 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002669
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002670- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2671 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2672 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2673 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002674 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2675 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2676 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2677 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002678
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002679- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2680 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002681
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002682- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2683
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002684- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2685 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2686
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002687- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2688 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2689 supported.
2690
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002691- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2692
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002693- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2694 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002695
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002696- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2697 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2698
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002699- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2700
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002701- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2702 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2703
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002704- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2705 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2706 functions but callable type objects.
2707
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002708- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002709 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002710 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002711
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002712- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2713 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002714
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002715- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2716 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002717
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002718- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2719 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2720 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2721 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2722
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002723- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2724 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002725
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002726- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2727 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2728 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2729 and __imul__.
2730
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002731- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002732 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2733 is called.
2734
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002735- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2736 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2737 interpreter was compiled.
2738
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002739- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2740 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2741 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002742 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002743 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2744 1, not 2.
2745
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002746- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2747 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2748 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2749 limit.
2750
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002751- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2752 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2753 bug #623464.
2754
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002755- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2756 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2757 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2758 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2759
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002760Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002761-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002762
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002763- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2764
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002765- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2766 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2767 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2768 with Python 2.3a2.
2769
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002770- os.path exposes getctime.
2771
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002772- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002773 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002774 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002775 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002776 unit tests of floating point results.
2777
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002778- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2779 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2780 has been increased.
2781
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002782- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2783 executed.
2784
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002785- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2786 postinstallation script.
2787
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002788- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2789 test the current module.
2790
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002791- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002792 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2793 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2794 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2795 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2796
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002797- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002798 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002799 Ward's Optik package.
2800
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002801- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2802 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2803 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2804 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2805
2806- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2807 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002808 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002809
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002810- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2811 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2812 shelf are binary pickles.
2813
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002814- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2815 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2816
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002817- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2818 modules are iterators now.
2819
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002820- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2821 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2822 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2823 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2824 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2825 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002826
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002827- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2828 with their entity value.
2829
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002830- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2831
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002832- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2833 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002834
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002835- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2836 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002837 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002838
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002839- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2840 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2841 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2842 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2843 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2844 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2845 main():
2846
2847 import locale
2848 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2849
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002850- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2851 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2852
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002853- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2854 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2855 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2856 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2857 to the new standard.
2858
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002859- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2860 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2861 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2862 an extension to the database.
2863
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002864- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2865 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2866 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2867 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002868 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002869
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002870- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002871 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002872
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002873- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2874 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2875 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2876 bounded integers.
2877
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002878- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2879 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2880 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2881 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2882 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2883 in existence.
2884
2885 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2886 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2887 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2888 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2889 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2890 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2891
2892 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2893 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2894 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2895 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2896
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002897- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2898 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2899 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2900
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002901- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2902
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002903- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2904 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2905 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2906 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2907
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002908- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2909 argument.
2910
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002911- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2912 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2913 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2914 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2915 [SF patch 560794].
2916
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002917- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2918 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2919 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002920 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2921 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2922 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002923
2924- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2925 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002926
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002927- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2928 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2929 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2930 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002931
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002932- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2933 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2934 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2935 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2936 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2937
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002938- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002939
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002940- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2941
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002942- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2943 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2944 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2945 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2946 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2947 identical to None.
2948
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002949- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2950 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2951 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2952 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2953 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2954 results now.
2955
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002956- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2957 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2958
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002959- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2960 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2961 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2962 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2963 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2964 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2965 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2966 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2967
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002968- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2969
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002970- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2971 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2972
2973- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2974 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2975 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2976 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2977 and other systems.
2978
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002979- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2980 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2981 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2982 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 +00002983 work well with these.
2984
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002985- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2986
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002987- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002988 connections.
2989
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002990- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2991 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2992 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2993
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002994- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2995 sets
2996
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002997- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2998 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2999 name.
3000
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003001- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3002 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3003 passed in.
3004
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003005- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003006 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003007 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3008 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003009
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003010- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3011
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003012- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3013
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003014- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3015 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3016 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3017
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003018- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3019 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3020 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3021 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003022 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003023
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003024- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003025 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003026 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003027
3028- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3029 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3030 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3031
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003032- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003033 the value of its expression argument.
3034
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003035- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3036 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3037 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3038
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003039- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3040 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3041 skipstone browser was included.
3042
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003043- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3044 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3045
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003046Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003047-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003048
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003049- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3050 names in addition to accepting file names.
3051
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003052- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3053 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3054 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3055 still used and useful.)
3056
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003057- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3058 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3059 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3060 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003061
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003062- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3063 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3064 the generated binary.
3065
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003066Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003067-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003068
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003069- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3070
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003071- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3072 except in the hands of experts.
3073
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003074- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003075 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3076 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3077 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003078
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003079- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3080 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3081 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3082 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3083 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3084 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3085 builds.
3086
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003087- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3088 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3089 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3090 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3091 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3092 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3093 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3094 new type.
3095
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003096- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003097
3098 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3099 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3100 positive infinities.
3101
3102 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3103 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3104 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3105 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3106 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3107 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3108 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3109
3110 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3111
3112 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3113
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003114- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3115 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3116 size of the executable.
3117
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003118- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3119 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3120 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3121 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003122
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003123- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3124
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003125- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3126 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3127 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003128
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003129- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3130 well as Unix.
3131
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003132- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3133 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3134 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3135 modules in the README file for details.
3136
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003137C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003138-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003139
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003140- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3141 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003142 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003143 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003144 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003145
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003146- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3147 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3148 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3149 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3150 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3151 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003152 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003153 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3154 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3155 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3156 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3157 aligned.)
3158
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003159- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3160 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3161 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3162
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003163- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3164 level.
3165
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003166- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3167 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3168 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3169 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3170 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3171
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003172- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3173 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3174 code.
3175
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003176- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3177 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3178 adjusting for negative indices.
3179
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003180- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3181 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3182 object.
3183
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003184- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3185 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3186 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3187
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003188- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3189 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003190
3191- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3192
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003193- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3194 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3195 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3196 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3197
3198- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3199
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003200- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003201
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003202- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003203 without going through the buffer API.
3204
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003205- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003206
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003207- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3208 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3209 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3210 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3211
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003212- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3213 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3214
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003215- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003216 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3217
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003218New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003219-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003220
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003221- OpenVMS is now supported.
3222
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003223- AtheOS is now supported.
3224
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003225- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3226
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003227- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3228
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003229Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003230-----
3231
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003232- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3233 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3234 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003235
3236Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003237-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003238
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003239- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3240 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3241 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3242 bugs.
3243 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003244 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003245 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3246 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003247 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003248
3249- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003250 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003251
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003252- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3253 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3254
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003255- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3256 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003257 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003258 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3259
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003260- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3261 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3262 use files" uninstall option).
3263
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003264- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3265
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003266- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3267 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3268
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003269- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3270 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3271 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3272
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003273- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3274 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3275 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3276 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3277 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003278 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3279 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3280 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003281
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003282- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003283 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003284 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3285 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3286 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3287 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3288 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3289 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3290 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3291 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3292 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3293 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3294 work around.
3295
3296- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3297 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3298 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3299 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3300 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3301 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3302 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3303 specified with O_CREAT too).
3304
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003305Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003306----
3307
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003308- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003309
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003310- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3311 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3312 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3313
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003314- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3315 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3316 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3317
3318- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3319 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3320 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3321 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3322 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3323 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3324 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3325 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003326
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003327- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3328 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3329 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003330
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003331- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3332 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3333 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3334 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3335 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003336
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003337- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3338 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3339 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003340
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003341- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3342 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003343
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003344- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3345 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3346 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3347 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3348 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003349
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003350- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3351 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3352 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3353
3354- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3355 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3356 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003357
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003358- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3359 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3360 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3361 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003362 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003363
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003364- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3365 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003366
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003367- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3368 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003369
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003370- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003371 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003372 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3373 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003374
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003375
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003376What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003377===============================
3378
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003379*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3380
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003381Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003382--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003383
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003384- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3385 with a custom metaclass.
3386
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003387Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003388-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003389
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003390- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3391 are proxies.
3392
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003393Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003394-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003395
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003396- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3397 very short strings.
3398
3399- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3400 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3401 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3402 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3403 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3404
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003405Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003406-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003407
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003408- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3409 close or delete time).
3410
3411- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3412 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3413
3414- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3415
3416- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003417 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003418
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003419Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003420-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003421
3422Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003423-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003424
3425C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003426-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003427
3428New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003429-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003430
3431Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003432-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003433
3434Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003435-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003436
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003437- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3438
3439- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3440 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3441
3442- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3443 deleted at process exit time.
3444
3445- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3446 in backslash.
3447
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003448Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003449----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003450
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003451- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3452 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3453 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3454
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003455
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003456What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003457===========================
3458
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003459*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3460
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003461Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003462--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003463
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003464- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3465 been extensively updated. See
3466
3467 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3468
3469 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3470
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003471- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3472 deleted!
3473
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003474- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3475 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3476 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3477 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3478 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3479
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003480- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3481
3482 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3483 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3484
3485 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3486 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3487 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3488 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3489 supported anyway.
3490
3491 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3492 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3493
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003494- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3495 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3496 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3497 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3498 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003499
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003500- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3501 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3502 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3503
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003504Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003505-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003506
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003507- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3508 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3509 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3510 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3511 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3512 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003513 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3514 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3515 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3516 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003517
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003518- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3519 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3520 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3521
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003522Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003523-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003524
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003525- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3526
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003527Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003528-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003529
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003530- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3531 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3532 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3533 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3534 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3535 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3536
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003537- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3538
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003539- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3540
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003541- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3542
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003543- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3544 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3545 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3546
3547- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3548
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003549Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003550-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003551
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003552- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3553 off a search on Google.
3554
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003555Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003556-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003557
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003558- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3559 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3560 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3561 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3562 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3563 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3564 other platforms should do likewise.
3565
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003566- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3567 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3568 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3569
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003570C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003571-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003572
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003573- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3574 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3575 producing key-value pairs.
3576
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003577- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003578 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003579 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3580 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3581 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3582 previously went unchallenged.
3583
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003584New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003585-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003586
3587Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003588-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003589
3590Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003591-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003592
3593Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003594----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003595
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003596- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3597 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003598
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003599- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3600 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3601 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3602 home.
3603
3604
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003605What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003606===========================
3607
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003608*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3609
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003610Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003611--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003612
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003613- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3614 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003615
3616 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003617 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003618
3619 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3620 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003621 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003622 This needs to be documented.
3623
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003624- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3625 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3626
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003627- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3628 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3629 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3630
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003631- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3632 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3633
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003634- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3635 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3636 class forbids it).
3637
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003638- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3639 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3640 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3641
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003642- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3643
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003644Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003645-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003646
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003647- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3648 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003649 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003650
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003651- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3652 (like 1 + '').
3653
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003654Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003655-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003656
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003657- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3658 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3659 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3660 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003661 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003662 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3663
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003664- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3665 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3666 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3667 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3668
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003669- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3670 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003671 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3672 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3673 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003674
3675- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3676 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003677
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003678- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3679 bytes on its input.
3680
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003681Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003682-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003683
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003684- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003685 convenience function.
3686
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003687- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3688 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3689 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003690 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3691 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3692 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3693 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3694 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3695 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003696
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003697- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3698 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3699 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3700 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3701
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003702- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3703 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3704 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3705
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003706- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3707 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3708 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3709 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3710
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003711- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3712 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003713 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003714 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3715 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3716 new -l and -e options.
3717
3718- statcache is now deprecated.
3719
3720- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3721 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003722 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003723 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3724 time properly taken into account.
3725
3726- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3727 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3728 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3729 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3730
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003731Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003732-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003733
3734Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003735-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003736
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003737- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3738 is built with libdb3 if available.
3739
3740- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3741
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003742C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003743-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003744
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003745- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3746 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3747 PySequence_Size().
3748
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003749- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3750
3751- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3752 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3753 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3754
3755- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3756 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3757
3758- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3759 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3760
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003761New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003762-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003763
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003764- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3765 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3766
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003767- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3768 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3769
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003770- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3771
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003772Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003773-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003774
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003775- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3776 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3777
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003778Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003779-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003780
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003781Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003782----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003783
3784- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3785 removed completely in the next release.
3786
3787- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3788 OSX.
3789
3790- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3791 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3792
3793- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3794
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003795
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003796What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003797===========================
3798
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003799*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3800
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003801Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003802--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003803
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003804- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003805 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003806 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003807 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3808 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003809 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3810 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003811 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3812 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003813
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003814- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3815 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3816
3817- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3818 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3819
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003820Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003821-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003822
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003823- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3824 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3825 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3826 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3827 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3828 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3829 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3830 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3831
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003832- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3833 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3834 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3835 example).
3836
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003837- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003838 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003839 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003840 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003841
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003842- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3843 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3844 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003845 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003846
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003847- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3848 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3849 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3850 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3851 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3852 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3853
3854 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3855
3856 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3857
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003858Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003859-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003860
3861- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3862
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003863- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3864
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003865- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3866 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003867
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003868- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3869 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3870 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3871 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3872 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3873 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003874 attributes.
3875
3876- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3877 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3878 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003879
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003880- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3881 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3882 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003883
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003884- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3885 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3886 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003887 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3888 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3889
3890- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3891 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003892
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003893Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003894-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003895
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003896- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3897 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3898
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003899- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3900 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3901 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3902 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3903
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003904- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3905 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3906 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3907 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3908
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003909 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3910 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3911 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3912 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3913 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3914 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3915 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3916 without losing information).
3917
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003918- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003919 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3920 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3921 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3922 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3923 module).
3924
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003925 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003926 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3927 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3928 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3929 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003930
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003931- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003932 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3933 encoding.
3934
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003935- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3936 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3937
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003938- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003939 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3940
3941- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3942 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3943 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3944 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3945
3946- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3947
3948- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3949 ON, and OFF.
3950
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003951- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3952 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3953
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003954Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003955-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003956
3957- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3958 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3959 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003960
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003961- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3962 been added: -X and -E.
3963
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003964Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003965-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003966
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003967- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3968 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3969
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003970C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003971-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003972
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003973- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3974 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3975 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3976 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3977 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3978
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003979- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3980 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3981 as long) arguments.
3982
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003983- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3984 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3985 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3986 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3987 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3988 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3989
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003990- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3991 input.
3992
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003993New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003994-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003995
3996Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003997-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003998
3999Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004000-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004001
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004002- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4003 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4004 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4005
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004006- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4007 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4008 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004009 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004010
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004011 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4012 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4013 import signal
4014 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004015
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004016 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004017 while 1:
4018 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004019 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004020 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4021 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4022 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4023 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004024
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004025
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004026What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4027===========================
4028
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004029*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4030
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004031Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004032--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004033
4034- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4035 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4036 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4037
4038- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4039 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4040 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4041 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4042 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4043 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4044 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004045
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004046- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004047 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004048 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4049 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4050 associate a docstring with a property.
4051
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004052- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4053 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4054 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4055 other built-in object types.
4056
4057- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4058 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4059 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4060 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4061 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4062
4063- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4064 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4065
4066- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4067 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004068 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004069 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4070 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4071 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4072 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4073 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4074
4075- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4076 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4077 class.
4078
4079- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4080 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4081 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4082 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4083
4084- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4085 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4086 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4087 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4088
4089- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4090 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4091
4092- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4093 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4094 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4095 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4096 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004097 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004098 with the same value as s.
4099
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004100- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4101
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004102Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004103----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004104
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004105- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4106
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004107- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4108 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4109 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4110 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4111 objects.
4112
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004113- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4114 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004115 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4116 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4117
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004118- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4119 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4120 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4121
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004122Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004123-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004124
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004125- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4126 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4127 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4128 by the instances.
4129
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004130- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4131 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4132 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4133
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004134- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4135 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4136 before the entire comparison is complete.
4137
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004138- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4139 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4140 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4141
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004142- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4143 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4144 getwriter().
4145
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004146- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4147 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4148
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004149- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004150 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4151 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4152
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004153- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4154 iterable object.
4155
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004156- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4157 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004158
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004159- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4160 authentication.
4161
4162- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4163 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004164
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004165- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004166 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4167 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4168 a sample driver.)
4169
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004170Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004171-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004172
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004173- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4174 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4175 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4176 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4177 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4178 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4179 kernel has large file support.
4180
4181- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4182 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4183 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4184 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4185 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4186
4187- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4188 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4189 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4190
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004191C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004192-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004193
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004194- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4195 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4196
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004197New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004198-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004199
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004200- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4201 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4202
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004203Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004204-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004205
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004206- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4207 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4208 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4209 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4210 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4211
4212- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4213 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4214 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4215 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4216
4217- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4218 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4219
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004220Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004221-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004222
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004223- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004224 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4225 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004226
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004227
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004228What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4229===========================
4230
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004231*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4232
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004233Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004234----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004235
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004236- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4237 big to represent as a C double.
4238
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004239- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4240 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4241 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4242 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4243 restriction).
4244
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004245- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4246 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4247 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4248 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4249 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4250
4251 >>> dir([])
4252 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4253 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4254 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4255 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4256 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4257 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4258 'reverse', 'sort']
4259
4260 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4261
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004262- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004263 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4264 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4265 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4266 OverflowError exception.
4267
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004268- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004269 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004270 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4271 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4272 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4273 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4274 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004275 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004276 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4277 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4278
4279 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4280 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4281 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4282 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004283
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004284- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004285 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4286 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4287 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4288 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4289 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4290 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4291 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4292 once it is created.
4293
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004294- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4295 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4296 (key, value) pairs.
4297
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004298- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004299 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4300 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4301
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004302- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4303 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4304 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4305 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4306 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004307
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004308- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004309 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4310 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4311
4312 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4313
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004314- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004315 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4316
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004317Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004318-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004319
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004320- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004321 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4322 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004323
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004324- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4325 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4326 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4327 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4328 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4329 in this area anymore).
4330
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004331- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4332 threading.Timer.
4333
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004334- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4335 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4336
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004337- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004338 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4339
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004340- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004341 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4342 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4343 converted to Python longs.
4344
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004345- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004346 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4347
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004348- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4349 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4350 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4351
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004352Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004353-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004354
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004355- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4356 division operators as per PEP 238.
4357
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004358Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004359-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004360
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004361- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4362 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4363 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4364 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4365
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004366C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004367-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004368
4369- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004370
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004371- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4372 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004373 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004374
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004375 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4376 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004377 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004378 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004379
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004380- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004381 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4382 module:
4383
4384 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004385
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004386 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4387 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004388
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004389 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4390 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004391
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004392 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4393
4394 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4395
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004396- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004397 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4398 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4399 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004400
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004401New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004402-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004403
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004404- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4405 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4406 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4407 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4408 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004409
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004410Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004411-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004412
4413Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004414-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004415
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004416- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4417 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4418 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4419 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004420 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4421 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4422 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4423 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4424 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004425
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004426- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004427 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4428
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004429
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004430What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4431===========================
4432
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004433*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4434
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004435Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004436-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004437
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004438- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4439 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4440
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004441- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4442 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4443 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004444
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004445- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4446 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4447 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4448 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004449
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004450- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4451
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004452- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004453
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004454Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004455-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004456
4457- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004458 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004459 the module docstring for details.
4460
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004461Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004462-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004463
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004464- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004465 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4466 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4467 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004468
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004469- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4470 Nick Mathewson.
4471
4472Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004473----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004474
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004475- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4476 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4477 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4478 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4479 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4480 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4481 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4482 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4483
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004484- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4485 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4486 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4487 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4488
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004489- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4490 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4491 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4492 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4493 come a long way).
4494
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004495- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4496 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4497 write filters for these warnings).
4498
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004499- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4500 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4501 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4502 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4503 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4504
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004505- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4506 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4507 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4508 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4509 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4510 older distribution.
4511
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004512Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004513-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004514
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004515- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4516 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004517 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004518
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004519- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4520 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4521 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4522
4523- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4524
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004525- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4526
4527- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4528
4529- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4530
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004531- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004532
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004533- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4534
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004535New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004536-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004537
4538C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004539-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004540
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004541- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4542 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4543 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4544 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4545 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4546 against buffer overruns.
4547
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004548- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004549 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4550 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004551 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4552 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4553 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4554
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004555- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4556 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4557 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4558 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4559 deprecated.
4560
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004561Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004562-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004563
4564- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4565 relevant is found.
4566
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004567
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004568What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004569===========================
4570
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004571*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4572
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004573Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004574----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004575
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004576- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4577 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4578 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4579 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4580 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4581 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4582 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4583 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004584 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004585 repaired.
4586
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004587- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004588 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004589 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4590 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4591 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4592 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4593 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4594 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4595 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4596 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4597
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004598- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4599 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4600 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4601 leading BMO character).
4602
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004603- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4604 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4605 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4606
4607 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4608 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4609 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004610
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004611 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4612 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4613 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4614 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4615 for various simple to use conversions.
4616
4617 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4618 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4619
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004620 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4621 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4622 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4623 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4624 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4625 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4626 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4627 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4628 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4629 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4630 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4631 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4632 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4633 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4634 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004635
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004636- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4637 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4638 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004639 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004640 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004641
4642 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004643 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4644 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4645 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4646 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4647 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004648 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4649 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004650
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004651 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4652 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4653 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004654 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004655
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004656- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4657 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4658 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4659 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4660 floating arithmetic,
4661
4662 x = 9007199254740992.0
4663 print long(x)
4664
4665 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4666 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4667 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4668 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4669 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4670 functions are of good quality).
4671
4672 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4673 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4674 algorithms to break.
4675
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004676- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4677 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4678 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4679 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4680 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4681 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4682 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4683 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4684 order.
4685
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004686- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4687 operation along the most common code paths.
4688
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004689- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4690 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4691
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004692- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4693 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4694 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4695 {}.update(UserDict())
4696
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004697- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4698 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4699 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4700 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4701 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4702 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4703 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4704 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4705
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004706- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004707 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004708
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004709 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004710 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4711 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004712 join() method of strings
4713 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004714 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4715 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004716 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004717 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004718
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004719- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4720 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4721
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004722- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4723 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4724
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004725- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4726 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4727 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4728 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4729
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004730- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4731 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004732 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004733 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4734 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004735
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004736- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4737
4738
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004739Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004740-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004741
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004742- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004743 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004744 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4745 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4746
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004747- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4748 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4749
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004750- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4751 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4752 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4753 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4754
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004755- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4756 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4757 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4758
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004759- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4760
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004761- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4762
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004763- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4764 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4765 that are still imported into string.py).
4766
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004767- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4768
4769- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4770 Now it does.
4771
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004772- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4773
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004774- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4775 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4776 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4777 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4778 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004779 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4780 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004781
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004782- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4783 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4784 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4785 'help(object)'.
4786
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004787Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004788-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004789
4790- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004791 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004792 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4793 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4794
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004795- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004796 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4797 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004798
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004799C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004800-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004801
4802- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4803 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004804
4805----
4806
4807**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**