blob: c21a6c611b71f7d3c128b7aa589f93fe2835e8b1 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000015- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
16 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
17 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
18 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
19 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
20 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
21 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
22 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
23 destroyed.
24
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +000025- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
26 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
27 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
28 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
29 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
30 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
31 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
32 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
33
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +000034- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
35 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
36 character other than a space.
37
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +000038- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
39 by the function object or by the method object, the function
40 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
41 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
42 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
43 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
44 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
45 attributes with the same name.
46
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000047- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
48 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
49 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
50 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
51 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
52 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
53 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
54 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
55 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
56 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
57 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
58 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
59 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
60 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +000061
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +000062- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
63 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
64 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
65 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
66 This has been repaired.
67
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000068- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
69
70- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
71
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +000072- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
73 over a sequence.
74
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +000075- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
76
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +000077- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
78 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
79 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
80 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
81 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
82 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
83 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
84 records with equal keys is unchanged).
85
Raymond Hettinger0a9b9da2003-10-29 06:54:43 +000086- Added a list.sorted() classmethod that returns a new sorted list
87 from any iterable.
Alex Martellidd666452003-10-25 13:02:57 +000088
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +000089- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
90 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
91 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
92
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +000093- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
94 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
95 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
96 freelist.
97
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +000098- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
99 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
100
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000101- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
102 number.
103
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000104- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
105 a TypeError exception.
106
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000107- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
108 820195.
109
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000110- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
111 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
112 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
113
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000114Extension modules
115-----------------
116
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000117- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
118 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
119 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
120 other functions that expect a function argument.
121
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000122- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
123
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000124- os.getsid was added.
125
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000126- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
127 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
128 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
129
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000130- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
131
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000132- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
133
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000134- readline.clear_history was added.
135
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000136- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
137
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000138- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
139
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000140- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
141
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000142- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
143
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000144- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
145
146- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
147
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000148- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
149
150- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
151
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000152- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
153 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
154 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
155
156- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
157 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
158 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
159 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
160 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
161 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
162 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
163
164- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
165 iterators from a single iterable.
166
167- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
168 of raising a TypeError exception.
169
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000170Library
171-------
172
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000173- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
174 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
175
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000176- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
177 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
178
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000179- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
180
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000181- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
182
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000183- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
184
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000185- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
186 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
187
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000188- heapq.py has been converted to C for improved performance
189
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000190- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
191 a string).
192
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000193- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
194
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000195- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
196
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000197- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
198
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000199- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
200
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000201- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
202 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
203 list of fieldnames.
204
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000205- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
206 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
207
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000208- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
209
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000210- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
211 empty lists.
212
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000213- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
214 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
215 and shelves.
216
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000217- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
218 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
219
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000220- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000221 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
222 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000223
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000224- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
225 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000226 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000227
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000228- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000229 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
230 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
231
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000232- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
233 and removed in Py2.4.
234
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000235- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
236
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000237Tools/Demos
238-----------
239
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000240- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
241
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000242- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
243 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
244 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
245 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
246
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000247- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
248
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000249- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
250 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
251 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
252 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
253 now.
254
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000255- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
256 in effect
257
258- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
259 C-c C-h
260
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000261- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
262 -d option was given.
263
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000264Build
265-----
266
267C API
268-----
269
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000270- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
271 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
272 about 10% faster.
273
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000274- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
275 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
276
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000277- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
278 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
279 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
280 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
281
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000282New platforms
283-------------
284
285Tests
286-----
287
288Windows
289-------
290
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000291- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
292 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
293 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
294 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
295
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000296- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
297 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
298 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
299
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000300Mac
301----
302
303
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000304What's New in Python 2.3 final?
305===============================
306
307*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
308
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000309IDLE
310----
311
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000312- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
313 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
314 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
315 context-menu actions.
316
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000317- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
318 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
319 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
320 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
321 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
322 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
323 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
324 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
325 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
326
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000327
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000328What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
329=============================================
330
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000331*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000332
333Core and builtins
334-----------------
335
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000336- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000337 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000338 comment at the end are still unsupported.
339
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000340Extension modules
341-----------------
342
343- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
344 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
345 than once. This has been fixed.
346
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000347- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
348 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
349 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
350 call.
351
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000352- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
353
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000354Library
355-------
356
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000357- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
358 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
359
360- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
361 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
362 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
363 restored.
364
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000365IDLE
366----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000367
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000368- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000369
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000370Build
371-----
372
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000373- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
374 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
375
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000376C API
377-----
378
379Windows
380-------
381
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000382- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
383 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
384
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000385- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
386
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000387Mac
388---
389
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000390- Various fixes to pimp.
391
392- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
393
394- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
395 more problems than it solves.
396
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000397
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000398What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
399=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000400
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000401*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
402
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000403Core and builtins
404-----------------
405
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000406- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
407 by sys.setcheckinterval().
408
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000409- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
410 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000411 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000412
413- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
414 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
415 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000416 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000417
418- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
419 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000420
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000421- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
422 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
423 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
424
425- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000426 770247.
427
428- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000429
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000430Extension modules
431-----------------
432
433- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
434 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
435
436- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
437
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000438- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
439
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000440- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
441 contained within the _strptime module.
442
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000443- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
444 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
445
446- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000447 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
448
449- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
450 the find_class attribute, if present.
451
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000452- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000453
454 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
455 (SF bug 763298).
456
457 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000458 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
459 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
460 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000461
462 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
463
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000464Library
465-------
466
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000467- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
468
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000469- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
470 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
471 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
472 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
473 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
474 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
475 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
476 or Tester().
477
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000478- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
479 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
480 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
481 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
482 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
483 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
484 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
485 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
486 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000487
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000488 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000489
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000490- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
491 weren't before was an oversight.
492
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000493- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
494 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
495
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000496- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
497 when there are no lines.
498
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000499- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
500 which could occur with Tk 8.4
501
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000502- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
503 to child processes.
504
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000505- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
506
507- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
508
509- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
510 xmlrpclib.
511
512- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
513 responses.
514
515- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
516 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
517
518- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
519 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
520 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
521
522- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
523 used as patterns.
524
525- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
526 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
527 than Tk 8.3.
528
529- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
530
531- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000532
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000533Tools/Demos
534-----------
535
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000536- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
537
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000538- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
539
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000540- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000541
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000542Build
543-----
544
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000545- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
546
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000547- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
548
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000549- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
550 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000551
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000552- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
553 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
554 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000555
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000556C API
557-----
558
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000559- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
560 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
561
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000562Windows
563-------
564
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000565- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
566 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
567 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
568 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
569 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
570 Python exception ::
571
572 thread.error: can't start new thread
573
574 is raised now.
575
576- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
577 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
578 instead of from DLL teardown.
579
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000580Mac
581---
582
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000583- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000584 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000585 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
586 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
587 the executable in the bundle.
588
589- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000590
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000591- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
592
593- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
594 on Panther.
595
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000596What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
597================================
598
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000599*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000600
601Core and builtins
602-----------------
603
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000604- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
605 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
606 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
607 with the -i option.
608
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000609- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
610 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
611
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000612- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
613 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
614
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000615- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
616 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
617 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
618 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
619 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
620 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
621 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
622 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
623 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
624 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
625 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
626 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
627 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000628
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000629- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
630 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
631 embedded in a lambda expression.
632
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000633- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
634 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
635 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
636 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
637 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
638
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000639- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
640 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
641 matches the restriction on classic classes.
642
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000643- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
644 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
645
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000646- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
647 It's writable again.
648
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000649- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
650 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
651 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000652 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000653
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000654- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
655 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
656 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
657
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000658Extension modules
659-----------------
660
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000661- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
662 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
663
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000664- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
665 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
666 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
667 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
668
669- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
670 collection.
671
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000672- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
673 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
674 unique within a single program run.
675
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000676- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
677 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
678
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000679- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
680 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
681
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000682- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
683 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000684
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000685- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
686
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000687- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
688 Fixes SF bug #730685.
689
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000690- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
691 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
692 for many BSD-derived systems.
693
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000694
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000695Library
696-------
697
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000698- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
699 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
700 primary ones:
701
702 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
703 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
704 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
705
706 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
707 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
708 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
709 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
710 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
711 framework features (which doctest lacks).
712
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000713- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
714 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
715 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
716 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
717 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
718 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
719 argument.
720
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000721- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
722 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
723 in the archive.
724
725- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
726 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
727
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000728- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
729 569574).
730
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000731- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
732 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
733 no more.
734
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000735- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
736 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
737 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
738 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
739 code coverage.
740
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000741- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
742 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
743 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000744 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
745 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000746
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000747- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
748 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
749 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000750 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000751
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000752- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
753
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000754- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
755 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
756 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
757 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
758
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000759- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
760 handling.
761
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000762- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
763 __doc__ of data descriptors.
764
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000765- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
766 in socket.py.
767
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000768- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
769
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000770- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
771 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
772 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
773 opener with proxy support.
774
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000775- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
776
777- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
778
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000779Tools/Demos
780-----------
781
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000782- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
783
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000784- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
785
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000786- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
787 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000788
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000789- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
790 files.
791
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000792Build
793-----
794
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000795- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000796 different root directory.
797
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000798C API
799-----
800
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000801- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
802 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
803 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
804 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
805 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
806 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
807 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
808 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
809 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
810 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
811
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000812- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
813 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
814 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
815 from Python.
816
817
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000818New platforms
819-------------
820
821None this time.
822
823Tests
824-----
825
826- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
827 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
828
829Windows
830-------
831
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000832- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
833
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000834- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
835 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
836 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
837 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
838 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
839 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
840 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
841 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
842 that's what it's for.
843
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000844Mac
845---
846
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000847- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
848 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
849 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
850 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000851- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
852 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
853- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000854
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000855SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
856------------------------------------
857
858430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
859598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
860622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
861661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
862683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
863697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
864713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
865724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
866727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
867729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
868730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
869731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
870732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
871733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
872735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
873740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
874744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
875745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
876747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
877749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
878751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
879753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
880755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
881757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
882760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
883
884
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000885What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
886================================
887
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000888*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000889
890Core and builtins
891-----------------
892
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000893- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
894 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
895
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000896- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
897 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
898 and cannot be strings).
899
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000900- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
901 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
902 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
903 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
904
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000905- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
906 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
907 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
908 Python itself.
909
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000910- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
911 the referenced object, if it has one.
912
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +0000913- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
914 the thread started at
915 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
916
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +0000917- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
918 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
919 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
920 placed on a list index.
921
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +0000922- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
923 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
924 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
925 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
926
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +0000927- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
928 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
929 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
930 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
931 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
932 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
933 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
934
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +0000935- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
936 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
937 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
938 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
939 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
940
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +0000941- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
942 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +0000943
944- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
945 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
946 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
947 #693195.)
948
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +0000949- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
950 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000951
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000952- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +0000953 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +0000954 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
955 interpreter executions, would fail.
956
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000957- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +0000958 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +0000959 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +0000960
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000961Extension modules
962-----------------
963
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +0000964- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
965 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
966 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
967 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
968
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +0000969- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
970 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
971
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +0000972- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
973 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
974 and Greg Chapman.)
975
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +0000976- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
977 recursively.
978
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +0000979- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +0000980 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
981 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
982 leaks.
983
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +0000984- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
985
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +0000986- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
987 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
988 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
989 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
990 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
991 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
992 #705836.
993
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000994- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +0000995 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
996
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +0000997- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
998 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
999 See SF bug #692416.
1000
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001001- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1002 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1003
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001004- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1005 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1006 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001007
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001008- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001009 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1010 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1011
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001012- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1013 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1014 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1015 timeouts to work properly.
1016
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001017Library
1018-------
1019
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001020- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1021 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1022 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1023 future release.
1024
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001025- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1026 for querying platform dependent features.
1027
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001028- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001029
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001030- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1031 pickle protocol versions.
1032
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001033- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1034 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1035 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1036
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001037- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1038
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001039- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1040 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1041 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1042 modules.
1043
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001044- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1045 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1046 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1047
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001048- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1049 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1050
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001051- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1052 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1053 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1054
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001055- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001056 MS Office extensions.
1057
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001058- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1059 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1060
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001061- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1062 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1063
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001064- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1065 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1066 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1067 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1068 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1069 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1070
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001071- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1072 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1073 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001074
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001075- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1076 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1077 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1078
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001079- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1080
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001081- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1082 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1083 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1084
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001085Tools/Demos
1086-----------
1087
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001088- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1089 See the module docstring for details.
1090
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001091Build
1092-----
1093
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001094- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1095 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001096
1097C API
1098-----
1099
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001100- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1101
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001102- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1103 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1104 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1105
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001106- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1107 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001108
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001109 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1110 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1111 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001112
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001113- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001114 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1115
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001116- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1117 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1118 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001119
1120New platforms
1121-------------
1122
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001123None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001124
1125Tests
1126-----
1127
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001128- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1129 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001130
1131Windows
1132-------
1133
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001134- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1135 function.
1136
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001137- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1138 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001139
1140Mac
1141---
1142
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001143- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1144 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001145
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001146- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1147 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001148
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001149- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1150 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1151 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001152
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001153- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001154 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1155 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001156
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001157- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1158 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001159
1160
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001161What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1162=================================
1163
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001164*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001165
1166Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001167-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001168
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001169- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1170 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1171 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1172
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001173- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1174 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1175 (SF patch #664376.)
1176
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001177- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1178 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1179 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1180 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1181 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1182 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001183 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001184
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001185- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1186 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1187 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1188 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001189 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001190
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001191- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1192 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1193 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1194 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1195 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1196 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1197 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1198 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1199 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1200 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1201 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1202
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001203- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1204 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1205 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1206 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1207 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1208 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1209
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001210- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1211 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1212
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001213- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1214 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1215 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1216 case.)
1217
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001218- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1219 passed as unicode strings.
1220
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001221- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1222 See SF bug #683467.
1223
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001224- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1225 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1226
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001227- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1228
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001229- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1230
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001231- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1232 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1233 arguments.
1234
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001235- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1236 See SF bug #667147.
1237
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001238- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001239 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001240 See SF bug #676155.
1241
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001242- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001243 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001244 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1245 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1246 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1247 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1248 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1249 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001250
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001251Extension modules
1252-----------------
1253
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001254- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1255 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1256 tp_as_number pointer.
1257
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001258- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1259 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1260 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1261 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1262 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1263
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001264- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1265
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001266- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1267
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001268- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001269 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001270 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1271 patch #678531.)
1272
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001273- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1274 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1275
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001276- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1277 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1278
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001279- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1280
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001281- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1282 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1283 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1284
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001285- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1286
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001287- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1288 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1289
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001290- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001291
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001292- datetime changes:
1293
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001294 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1295
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001296 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1297 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1298 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1299 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1300 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1301 now.
1302
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001303 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001304 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1305 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001306
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001307 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001308 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001309 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1310 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1311 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1312 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001313
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001314 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1315 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1316 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001317 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1318
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001319 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1320 by a later example coded by Guido.
1321
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001322 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001323 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1324 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1325 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001326 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1327 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1328
1329 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1330 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1331 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1332 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1333 tzinfo subclass instance.
1334
1335 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1336 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1337 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1338 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1339 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1340 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1341 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1342 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001343
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001344 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1345 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1346 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1347 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1348 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001349 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1350
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001351 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001352
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001353 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1354 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1355 as a naive datetime object.
1356
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001357 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1358 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1359 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1360
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001361 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1362 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1363 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1364 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1365 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1366 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1367 comparison.
1368
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001369 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1370 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1371 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1372 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001373 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001374
1375 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001376
1377 and ::
1378
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001379 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1380
1381 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1382 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1383 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1384 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1385
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001386 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1387 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1388 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1389 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1390 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1391
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001392 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1393 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001394 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1395 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001396
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001397Library
1398-------
1399
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001400- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1401 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1402
1403- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1404 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1405 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1406 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1407 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1408 See PEP 307 for details.
1409
1410- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1411 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1412
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001413- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1414 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001415 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001416 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1417 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001418 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001419
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001420- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1421 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1422
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001423- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1424 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1425 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1426
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001427- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1428
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001429- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1430 exception.
1431
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001432- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1433 class.
1434
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001435- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1436 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1437 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1438
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001439- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1440 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1441
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001442- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001443 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1444 See SF bug #659228.
1445
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001446- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1447 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1448 See SF patch #651082.
1449
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001450- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001451
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001452- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1453 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1454
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001455- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001456 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001457
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001458- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1459 DOS paths from other platforms.
1460
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001461Tools/Demos
1462-----------
1463
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001464- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1465 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1466 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1467 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1468 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1469 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1470 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1471 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1472 example:
1473
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001474 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1475 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001476
1477 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1478
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001479
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001480Build
1481-----
1482
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001483- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1484 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1485 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001486 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1487
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001488 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1489
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001490- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1491 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1492 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1493 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1494 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1495 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1496 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1497 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1498 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1499
1500- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1501 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1502 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1503 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1504
1505- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1506 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1507
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001508C API
1509-----
1510
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001511- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1512 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001513
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001514- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1515 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1516 tp_as_number pointer.
1517
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001518- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1519 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1520 (SF #681367)
1521
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001522- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1523 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1524 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1525 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001526
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001527Tests
1528-----
1529
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001530- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001531 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1532 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1533 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1534 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1535 pydoc.)
1536
1537- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1538
1539- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001540
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001541Windows
1542-------
1543
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001544- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1545 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1546 time).
1547
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001548- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1549 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1550
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001551- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1552 release without strong cryptography.
1553
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001554- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001555 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001556
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001557- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1558 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1559
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001560Mac
1561---
1562
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001563- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1564 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001565
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001566- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1567 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1568 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001569
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001570- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1571 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001572
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001573- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1574 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1575 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1576 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001577
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001578- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001579 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1580 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1581 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001582
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001583
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001584What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001585=================================
1586
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001587*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001588
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001589Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001590--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001591
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001592- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1593
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001594- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1595 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001596 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001597 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001598 a different meaning than before.
1599
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001600- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001601 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001602 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001603
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001604- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001605 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001606 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001607
1608- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1609 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1610 and deallocation.
1611
1612- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1613 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1614
1615- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1616 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1617 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1618 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1619 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1620
1621- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1622 now detected by the garbage collector.
1623
1624- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1625 [SF bug 519621]
1626
1627- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1628 identifier.
1629
1630- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1631 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1632 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1633 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1634 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1635 [SF bug 563060]
1636
1637- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1638 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1639 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1640 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1641 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1642
1643- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1644 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1645 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1646
1647- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1648
1649- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1650 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1651 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1652 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1653 state of the slots would be lost.)
1654
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001655Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001656-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001657
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001658- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001659 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1660 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1661 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1662 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001663 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1664 Jython 2.1.
1665
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001666- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001667 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001668 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1669 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1670 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1671 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1672 these, see PEP 302.
1673
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001674- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1675 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1676 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1677
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001678- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1679 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1680 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1681
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001682- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1683 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1684 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1685
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001686- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1687 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1688 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1689 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1690 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1691 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1692 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1693 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1694 releases or implementations.
1695
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001696- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001697 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1698 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001699
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001700- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1701 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1702
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001703- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1704 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1705 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1706
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001707- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1708 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1709
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001710- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1711 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001712 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1713 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001714
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001715- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1716 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1717 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1718 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1719 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1720
1721 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1722 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1723 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1724 pattern.
1725
1726 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1727 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1728 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1729 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1730
1731 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1732 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1733 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1734 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1735 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1736 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1737
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001738- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1739 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1740 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1741 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1742 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1743 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1744 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1745 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001746
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001747- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1748 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1749 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1750 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1751 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001752 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1753 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1754 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1755 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1756 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1757 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1758 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001759
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001760- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1761 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1762
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001763- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1764 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1765 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1766 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1767 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1768 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1769 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1770 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1771 to Zack Weinberg!
1772
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001773- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1774 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1775 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1776 type. This has been fixed now.
1777
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001778- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1779 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1780 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1781
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001782- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1783 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1784 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1785 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1786 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1787 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1788 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1789 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001790 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001791
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001792- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1793 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1794 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001795
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001796- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1797 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1798 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1799 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1800 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1801 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1802 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1803 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001804 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001805 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1806 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1807
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001808- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1809 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1810 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1811 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1812 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1813 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1814 this.)
1815
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001816- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1817 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001818 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001819 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001820 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1821 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001822 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1823 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001824
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001825- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1826 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1827 currently running.
1828
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001829- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1830 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1831 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1832 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1833
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001834- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1835 as directory names.
1836
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001837- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1838 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1839
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001840- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1841 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1842
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001843- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001844 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1845 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001846
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001847- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1848 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1849 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1850 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1851 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1852
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001853- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1854 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1855 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1856 removed.
1857
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001858- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1859 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1860 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1861
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001862- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1863 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1864 to __debug__.
1865
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001866- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1867 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1868 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1869
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001870- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1871 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1872 deprecated now.
1873
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001874- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1875 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1876 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001877
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001878- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1879 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1880 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1881 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1882 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001883
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001884- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1885 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1886
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001887- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1888 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1889 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001890 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001891 is backward compatible.
1892
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001893- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1894 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1895 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1896 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1897 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1898
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001899- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1900 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1901 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1902 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1903 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1904 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001905
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001906- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1907 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1908
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001909- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1910 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
1911
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001912- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
1913 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
1914 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
1915 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
1916 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
1917
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00001918- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
1919 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
1920 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
1921
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001922- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00001923 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
1924
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00001925- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
1926 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
1927 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00001928
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00001929- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
1930 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
1931
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00001932- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
1933 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
1934 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
1935
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00001936- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
1937
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001938Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001939-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001940
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00001941- Added three operators to the operator module:
1942 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
1943 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
1944 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
1945
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00001946- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
1947
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001948- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
1949 archives.
1950
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001951- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
1952 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
1953 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
1954
1955 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
1956
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001957- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
1958 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
1959 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00001960 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00001961
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00001962- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
1963 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
1964 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
1965 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001966 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
1967 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
1968 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
1969 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00001970
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00001971- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
1972 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00001973
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00001974- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
1975
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00001976- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
1977 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
1978
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00001979- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
1980 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
1981 supported.
1982
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00001983- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
1984
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00001985- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
1986 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00001987
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00001988- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
1989 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
1990
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001991- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
1992
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001993- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
1994 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
1995
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00001996- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
1997 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
1998 functions but callable type objects.
1999
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002000- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002001 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002002 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002003
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002004- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2005 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002006
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002007- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2008 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002009
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002010- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2011 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2012 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2013 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2014
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002015- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2016 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002017
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002018- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2019 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2020 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2021 and __imul__.
2022
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002023- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002024 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2025 is called.
2026
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002027- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2028 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2029 interpreter was compiled.
2030
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002031- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2032 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2033 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002034 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002035 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2036 1, not 2.
2037
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002038- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2039 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2040 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2041 limit.
2042
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002043- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2044 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2045 bug #623464.
2046
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002047- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2048 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2049 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2050 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2051
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002052Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002053-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002054
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002055- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2056
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002057- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2058 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2059 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2060 with Python 2.3a2.
2061
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002062- os.path exposes getctime.
2063
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002064- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002065 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002066 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002067 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002068 unit tests of floating point results.
2069
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002070- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2071 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2072 has been increased.
2073
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002074- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2075 executed.
2076
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002077- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2078 postinstallation script.
2079
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002080- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2081 test the current module.
2082
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002083- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002084 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2085 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2086 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2087 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2088
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002089- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002090 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002091 Ward's Optik package.
2092
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002093- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2094 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2095 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2096 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2097
2098- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2099 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002100 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002101
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002102- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2103 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2104 shelf are binary pickles.
2105
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002106- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2107 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2108
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002109- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2110 modules are iterators now.
2111
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002112- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2113 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2114 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2115 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2116 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2117 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002118
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002119- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2120 with their entity value.
2121
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002122- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2123
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002124- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2125 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002126
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002127- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2128 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002129 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002130
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002131- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2132 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2133 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2134 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2135 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2136 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2137 main():
2138
2139 import locale
2140 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2141
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002142- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2143 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2144
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002145- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2146 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2147 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2148 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2149 to the new standard.
2150
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002151- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2152 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2153 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2154 an extension to the database.
2155
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002156- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2157 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2158 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2159 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002160 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002161
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002162- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002163 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002164
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002165- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2166 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2167 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2168 bounded integers.
2169
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002170- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2171 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2172 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2173 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2174 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2175 in existence.
2176
2177 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2178 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2179 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2180 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2181 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2182 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2183
2184 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2185 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2186 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2187 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2188
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002189- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2190 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2191 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2192
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002193- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2194
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002195- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2196 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2197 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2198 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2199
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002200- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2201 argument.
2202
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002203- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2204 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2205 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2206 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2207 [SF patch 560794].
2208
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002209- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2210 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2211 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002212 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2213 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2214 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002215
2216- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2217 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002218
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002219- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2220 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2221 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2222 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002223
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002224- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2225 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2226 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2227 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2228 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2229
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002230- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002231
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002232- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2233
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002234- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2235 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2236 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2237 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2238 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2239 identical to None.
2240
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002241- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2242 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2243 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2244 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2245 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2246 results now.
2247
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002248- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2249 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2250
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002251- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2252 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2253 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2254 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2255 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2256 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2257 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2258 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2259
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002260- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2261
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002262- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2263 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2264
2265- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2266 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2267 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2268 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2269 and other systems.
2270
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002271- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2272 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2273 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2274 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 +00002275 work well with these.
2276
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002277- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2278
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002279- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002280 connections.
2281
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002282- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2283 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2284 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2285
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002286- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2287 sets
2288
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002289- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2290 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2291 name.
2292
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002293- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2294 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2295 passed in.
2296
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002297- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002298 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002299 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2300 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002301
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002302- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2303
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002304- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2305
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002306- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2307 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2308 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2309
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002310- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2311 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2312 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2313 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002314 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002315
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002316- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002317 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002318 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002319
2320- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2321 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2322 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2323
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002324- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002325 the value of its expression argument.
2326
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002327- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2328 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2329 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2330
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002331- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2332 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2333 skipstone browser was included.
2334
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002335- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2336 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2337
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002338Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002339-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002340
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002341- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2342 names in addition to accepting file names.
2343
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002344- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2345 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2346 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2347 still used and useful.)
2348
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002349- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2350 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2351 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2352 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002353
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002354- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2355 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2356 the generated binary.
2357
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002358Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002359-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002360
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002361- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2362
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002363- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2364 except in the hands of experts.
2365
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002366- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002367 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2368 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2369 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002370
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002371- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2372 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2373 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2374 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2375 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2376 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2377 builds.
2378
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002379- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2380 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2381 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2382 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2383 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2384 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2385 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2386 new type.
2387
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002388- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002389
2390 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2391 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2392 positive infinities.
2393
2394 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2395 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2396 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2397 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2398 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2399 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2400 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2401
2402 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2403
2404 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2405
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002406- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2407 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2408 size of the executable.
2409
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002410- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2411 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2412 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2413 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002414
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002415- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2416
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002417- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2418 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2419 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002420
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002421- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2422 well as Unix.
2423
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002424- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2425 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2426 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2427 modules in the README file for details.
2428
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002429C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002430-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002431
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002432- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2433 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002434 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002435 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002436 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002437
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002438- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2439 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2440 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2441 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2442 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2443 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002444 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002445 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2446 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2447 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2448 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2449 aligned.)
2450
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002451- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2452 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2453 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2454
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002455- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2456 level.
2457
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002458- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2459 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2460 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2461 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2462 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2463
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002464- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2465 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2466 code.
2467
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002468- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2469 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2470 adjusting for negative indices.
2471
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002472- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2473 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2474 object.
2475
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002476- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2477 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2478 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2479
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002480- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2481 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002482
2483- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2484
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002485- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2486 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2487 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2488 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2489
2490- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2491
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002492- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002493
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002494- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002495 without going through the buffer API.
2496
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002497- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002498
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002499- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2500 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2501 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2502 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2503
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002504- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2505 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2506
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002507- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002508 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2509
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002510New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002511-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002512
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002513- OpenVMS is now supported.
2514
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002515- AtheOS is now supported.
2516
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002517- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2518
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002519- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2520
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002521Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002522-----
2523
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002524- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2525 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2526 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002527
2528Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002529-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002530
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002531- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2532 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2533 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2534 bugs.
2535 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002536 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002537 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2538 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002539 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002540
2541- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002542 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002543
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002544- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2545 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2546
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002547- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2548 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002549 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002550 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2551
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002552- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2553 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2554 use files" uninstall option).
2555
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002556- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2557
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002558- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2559 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2560
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002561- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2562 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2563 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2564
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002565- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2566 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2567 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2568 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2569 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002570 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2571 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2572 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002573
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002574- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002575 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002576 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2577 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2578 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2579 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2580 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2581 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2582 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2583 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2584 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2585 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2586 work around.
2587
2588- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2589 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2590 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2591 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2592 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2593 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2594 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2595 specified with O_CREAT too).
2596
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002597Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002598----
2599
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002600- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002601
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002602- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2603 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2604 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2605
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002606- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2607 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2608 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2609
2610- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2611 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2612 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2613 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2614 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2615 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2616 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2617 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002618
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002619- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2620 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2621 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002622
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002623- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2624 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2625 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2626 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2627 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002628
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002629- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2630 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2631 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002632
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002633- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2634 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002635
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002636- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2637 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2638 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2639 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2640 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002641
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002642- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2643 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2644 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2645
2646- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2647 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2648 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002649
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002650- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2651 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2652 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2653 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002654 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002655
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002656- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2657 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002658
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002659- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2660 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002661
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002662- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002663 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002664 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2665 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002666
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002667
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002668What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002669===============================
2670
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002671*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2672
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002673Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002674--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002675
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002676- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2677 with a custom metaclass.
2678
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002679Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002680-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002681
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002682- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2683 are proxies.
2684
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002685Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002686-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002687
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002688- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2689 very short strings.
2690
2691- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2692 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2693 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2694 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2695 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2696
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002697Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002698-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002699
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002700- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2701 close or delete time).
2702
2703- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2704 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2705
2706- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2707
2708- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002709 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002710
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002711Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002712-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002713
2714Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002715-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002716
2717C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002718-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002719
2720New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002721-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002722
2723Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002724-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002725
2726Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002727-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002728
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002729- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2730
2731- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2732 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2733
2734- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2735 deleted at process exit time.
2736
2737- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2738 in backslash.
2739
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002740Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002741----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002742
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002743- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2744 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2745 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2746
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002747
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002748What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002749===========================
2750
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002751*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2752
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002753Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002754--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002755
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002756- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2757 been extensively updated. See
2758
2759 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2760
2761 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2762
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002763- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2764 deleted!
2765
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002766- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2767 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2768 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2769 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2770 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2771
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002772- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2773
2774 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2775 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2776
2777 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2778 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2779 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2780 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2781 supported anyway.
2782
2783 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2784 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2785
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002786- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2787 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2788 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2789 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2790 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002791
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002792- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2793 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2794 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2795
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002796Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002797-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002798
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002799- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2800 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2801 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2802 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2803 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2804 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002805 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2806 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2807 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2808 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002809
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002810- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2811 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2812 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2813
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002814Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002815-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002816
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002817- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2818
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002819Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002820-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002821
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002822- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2823 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2824 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2825 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2826 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2827 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2828
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002829- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2830
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002831- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2832
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002833- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2834
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002835- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2836 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2837 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2838
2839- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2840
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002841Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002842-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002843
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002844- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2845 off a search on Google.
2846
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002847Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002848-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002849
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002850- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2851 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2852 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2853 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2854 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2855 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2856 other platforms should do likewise.
2857
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002858- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2859 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2860 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2861
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002862C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002863-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002864
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002865- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2866 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2867 producing key-value pairs.
2868
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002869- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002870 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002871 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2872 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2873 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2874 previously went unchallenged.
2875
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002876New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002877-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002878
2879Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002880-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002881
2882Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002883-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002884
2885Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002886----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002887
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002888- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2889 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002890
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002891- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2892 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2893 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2894 home.
2895
2896
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002897What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002898===========================
2899
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002900*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2901
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002902Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002903--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002904
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002905- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2906 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002907
2908 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002909 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002910
2911 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
2912 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002913 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002914 This needs to be documented.
2915
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00002916- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
2917 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
2918
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00002919- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
2920 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
2921 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
2922
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00002923- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
2924 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
2925
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002926- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
2927 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
2928 class forbids it).
2929
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00002930- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
2931 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
2932 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
2933
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002934- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
2935
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002936Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002937-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002938
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002939- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
2940 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002941 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00002942
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002943- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
2944 (like 1 + '').
2945
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002946Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002947-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002948
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002949- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
2950 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
2951 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
2952 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002953 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002954 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
2955
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00002956- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
2957 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
2958 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
2959 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
2960
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002961- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
2962 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002963 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
2964 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
2965 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00002966
2967- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
2968 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002969
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00002970- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
2971 bytes on its input.
2972
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002973Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002974-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002975
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00002976- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00002977 convenience function.
2978
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002979- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
2980 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
2981 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002982 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
2983 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
2984 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
2985 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
2986 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
2987 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00002988
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00002989- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
2990 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
2991 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
2992 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
2993
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00002994- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
2995 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
2996 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
2997
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002998- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
2999 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3000 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3001 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3002
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003003- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3004 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003005 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003006 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3007 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3008 new -l and -e options.
3009
3010- statcache is now deprecated.
3011
3012- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3013 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003014 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003015 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3016 time properly taken into account.
3017
3018- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3019 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3020 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3021 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3022
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003023Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003024-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003025
3026Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003027-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003028
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003029- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3030 is built with libdb3 if available.
3031
3032- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3033
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003034C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003035-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003036
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003037- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3038 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3039 PySequence_Size().
3040
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003041- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3042
3043- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3044 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3045 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3046
3047- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3048 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3049
3050- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3051 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3052
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003053New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003054-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003055
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003056- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3057 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3058
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003059- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3060 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3061
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003062- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3063
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003064Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003065-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003066
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003067- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3068 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3069
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003070Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003071-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003072
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003073Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003074----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003075
3076- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3077 removed completely in the next release.
3078
3079- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3080 OSX.
3081
3082- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3083 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3084
3085- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3086
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003087
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003088What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003089===========================
3090
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003091*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3092
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003093Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003094--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003095
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003096- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003097 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003098 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003099 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3100 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003101 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3102 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003103 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3104 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003105
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003106- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3107 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3108
3109- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3110 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3111
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003112Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003113-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003114
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003115- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3116 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3117 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3118 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3119 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3120 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3121 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3122 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3123
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003124- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3125 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3126 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3127 example).
3128
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003129- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003130 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003131 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003132 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003133
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003134- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3135 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3136 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003137 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003138
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003139- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3140 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3141 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3142 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3143 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3144 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3145
3146 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3147
3148 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3149
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003150Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003151-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003152
3153- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3154
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003155- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3156
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003157- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3158 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003159
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003160- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3161 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3162 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3163 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3164 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3165 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003166 attributes.
3167
3168- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3169 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3170 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003171
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003172- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3173 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3174 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003175
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003176- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3177 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3178 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003179 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3180 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3181
3182- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3183 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003184
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003185Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003186-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003187
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003188- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3189 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3190
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003191- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3192 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3193 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3194 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3195
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003196- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3197 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3198 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3199 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3200
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003201 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3202 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3203 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3204 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3205 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3206 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3207 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3208 without losing information).
3209
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003210- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003211 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3212 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3213 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3214 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3215 module).
3216
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003217 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003218 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3219 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3220 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3221 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003222
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003223- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003224 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3225 encoding.
3226
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003227- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3228 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3229
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003230- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003231 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3232
3233- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3234 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3235 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3236 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3237
3238- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3239
3240- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3241 ON, and OFF.
3242
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003243- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3244 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3245
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003246Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003247-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003248
3249- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3250 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3251 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003252
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003253- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3254 been added: -X and -E.
3255
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003256Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003257-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003258
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003259- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3260 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3261
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003262C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003263-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003264
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003265- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3266 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3267 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3268 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3269 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3270
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003271- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3272 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3273 as long) arguments.
3274
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003275- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3276 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3277 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3278 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3279 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3280 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3281
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003282- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3283 input.
3284
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003285New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003286-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003287
3288Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003289-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003290
3291Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003292-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003293
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003294- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3295 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3296 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3297
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003298- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3299 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3300 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003301 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003302
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003303 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3304 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3305 import signal
3306 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003307
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003308 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003309 while 1:
3310 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003311 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003312 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3313 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3314 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3315 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003316
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003317
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003318What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3319===========================
3320
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003321*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3322
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003323Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003324--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003325
3326- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3327 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3328 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3329
3330- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3331 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3332 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3333 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3334 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3335 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3336 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003337
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003338- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003339 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003340 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3341 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3342 associate a docstring with a property.
3343
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003344- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3345 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3346 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3347 other built-in object types.
3348
3349- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3350 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3351 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3352 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3353 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3354
3355- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3356 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3357
3358- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3359 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003360 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003361 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3362 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3363 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3364 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3365 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3366
3367- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3368 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3369 class.
3370
3371- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3372 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3373 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3374 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3375
3376- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3377 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3378 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3379 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3380
3381- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3382 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3383
3384- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3385 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3386 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3387 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3388 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003389 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003390 with the same value as s.
3391
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003392- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3393
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003394Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003395----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003396
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003397- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3398
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003399- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3400 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3401 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3402 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3403 objects.
3404
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003405- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3406 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003407 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3408 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3409
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003410- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3411 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3412 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3413
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003414Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003415-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003416
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003417- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3418 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3419 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3420 by the instances.
3421
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003422- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3423 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3424 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3425
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003426- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3427 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3428 before the entire comparison is complete.
3429
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003430- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3431 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3432 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3433
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003434- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3435 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3436 getwriter().
3437
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003438- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3439 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3440
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003441- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003442 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3443 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3444
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003445- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3446 iterable object.
3447
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003448- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3449 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003450
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003451- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3452 authentication.
3453
3454- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3455 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003456
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003457- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003458 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3459 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3460 a sample driver.)
3461
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003462Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003463-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003464
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003465- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3466 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3467 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3468 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3469 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3470 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3471 kernel has large file support.
3472
3473- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3474 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3475 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3476 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3477 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3478
3479- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3480 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3481 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3482
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003483C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003484-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003485
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003486- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3487 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3488
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003489New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003490-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003491
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003492- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3493 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3494
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003495Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003496-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003497
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003498- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3499 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3500 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3501 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3502 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3503
3504- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3505 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3506 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3507 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3508
3509- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3510 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3511
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003512Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003513-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003514
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003515- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003516 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3517 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003518
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003519
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003520What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3521===========================
3522
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003523*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3524
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003525Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003526----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003527
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003528- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3529 big to represent as a C double.
3530
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003531- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3532 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3533 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3534 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3535 restriction).
3536
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003537- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3538 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3539 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3540 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3541 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3542
3543 >>> dir([])
3544 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3545 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3546 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3547 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3548 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3549 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3550 'reverse', 'sort']
3551
3552 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3553
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003554- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003555 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3556 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3557 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3558 OverflowError exception.
3559
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003560- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003561 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003562 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3563 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3564 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3565 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3566 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003567 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003568 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3569 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3570
3571 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3572 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3573 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3574 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003575
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003576- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003577 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3578 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3579 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3580 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3581 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3582 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3583 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3584 once it is created.
3585
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003586- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3587 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3588 (key, value) pairs.
3589
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003590- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003591 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3592 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3593
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003594- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3595 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3596 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3597 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3598 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003599
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003600- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003601 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3602 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3603
3604 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3605
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003606- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003607 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3608
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003609Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003610-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003611
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003612- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003613 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3614 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003615
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003616- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3617 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3618 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3619 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3620 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3621 in this area anymore).
3622
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003623- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3624 threading.Timer.
3625
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003626- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3627 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3628
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003629- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003630 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3631
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003632- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003633 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3634 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3635 converted to Python longs.
3636
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003637- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003638 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3639
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003640- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3641 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3642 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3643
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003644Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003645-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003646
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003647- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3648 division operators as per PEP 238.
3649
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003650Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003651-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003652
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003653- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3654 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3655 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3656 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3657
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003658C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003659-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003660
3661- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003662
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003663- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3664 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003665 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003666
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003667 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3668 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003669 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003670 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003671
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003672- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003673 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3674 module:
3675
3676 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003677
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003678 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3679 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003680
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003681 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3682 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003683
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003684 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3685
3686 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3687
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003688- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003689 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3690 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3691 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003692
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003693New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003694-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003695
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003696- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3697 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3698 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3699 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3700 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003701
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003702Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003703-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003704
3705Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003706-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003707
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003708- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3709 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3710 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3711 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003712 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3713 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3714 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3715 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3716 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003717
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003718- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003719 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3720
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003721
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003722What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3723===========================
3724
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003725*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3726
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003727Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003728-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003729
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003730- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3731 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3732
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003733- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3734 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3735 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003736
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003737- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3738 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3739 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3740 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003741
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003742- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3743
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003744- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003745
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003746Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003747-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003748
3749- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003750 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003751 the module docstring for details.
3752
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003753Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003754-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003755
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003756- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003757 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3758 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3759 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003760
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003761- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3762 Nick Mathewson.
3763
3764Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003765----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003766
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003767- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3768 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3769 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3770 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3771 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3772 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3773 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3774 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3775
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003776- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3777 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3778 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3779 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3780
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003781- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3782 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3783 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3784 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3785 come a long way).
3786
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003787- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3788 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3789 write filters for these warnings).
3790
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003791- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3792 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3793 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3794 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3795 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3796
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003797- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3798 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3799 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3800 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3801 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3802 older distribution.
3803
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003804Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003805-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003806
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003807- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3808 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003809 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003810
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003811- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3812 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3813 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3814
3815- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3816
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003817- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3818
3819- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3820
3821- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3822
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003823- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003824
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003825- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3826
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003827New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003828-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003829
3830C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003831-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003832
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003833- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3834 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3835 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3836 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3837 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3838 against buffer overruns.
3839
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003840- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003841 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3842 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003843 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3844 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3845 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3846
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003847- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3848 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3849 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3850 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3851 deprecated.
3852
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003853Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003854-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003855
3856- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3857 relevant is found.
3858
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003859
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003860What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003861===========================
3862
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003863*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3864
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003865Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003866----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003867
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003868- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3869 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3870 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3871 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3872 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3873 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3874 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3875 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003876 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003877 repaired.
3878
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003879- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003880 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003881 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3882 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3883 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3884 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3885 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3886 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3887 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3888 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3889
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003890- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3891 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3892 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3893 leading BMO character).
3894
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003895- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3896 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3897 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3898
3899 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3900 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3901 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003902
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003903 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3904 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3905 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3906 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3907 for various simple to use conversions.
3908
3909 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3910 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
3911
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003912 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3913 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
3914 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
3915 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
3916 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3917 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
3918 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3919 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
3920 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3921 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
3922 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3923 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
3924 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
3925 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
3926 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003927
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003928- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
3929 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
3930 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003931 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003932 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003933
3934 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003935 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
3936 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
3937 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
3938 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
3939 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003940 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
3941 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00003942
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003943 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
3944 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
3945 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00003946 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003947
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00003948- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
3949 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
3950 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
3951 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
3952 floating arithmetic,
3953
3954 x = 9007199254740992.0
3955 print long(x)
3956
3957 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
3958 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
3959 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
3960 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
3961 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
3962 functions are of good quality).
3963
3964 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
3965 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
3966 algorithms to break.
3967
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00003968- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
3969 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
3970 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
3971 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
3972 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
3973 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
3974 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
3975 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
3976 order.
3977
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003978- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
3979 operation along the most common code paths.
3980
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003981- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
3982 the same as dict.has_key(x).
3983
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00003984- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
3985 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
3986 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
3987 {}.update(UserDict())
3988
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00003989- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
3990 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
3991 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
3992 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
3993 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
3994 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
3995 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
3996 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
3997
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003998- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003999 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004000
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004001 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004002 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4003 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004004 join() method of strings
4005 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004006 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4007 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004008 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004009 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004010
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004011- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4012 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4013
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004014- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4015 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4016
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004017- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4018 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4019 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4020 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4021
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004022- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4023 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004024 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004025 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4026 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004027
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004028- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4029
4030
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004031Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004032-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004033
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004034- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004035 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004036 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4037 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4038
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004039- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4040 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4041
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004042- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4043 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4044 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4045 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4046
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004047- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4048 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4049 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4050
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004051- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4052
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004053- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4054
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004055- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4056 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4057 that are still imported into string.py).
4058
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004059- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4060
4061- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4062 Now it does.
4063
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004064- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4065
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004066- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4067 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4068 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4069 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4070 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004071 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4072 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004073
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004074- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4075 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4076 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4077 'help(object)'.
4078
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004079Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004080-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004081
4082- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004083 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004084 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4085 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4086
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004087- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004088 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4089 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004090
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004091C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004092-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004093
4094- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4095 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004096
4097----
4098
4099**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**