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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +000015- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
16 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
17
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000018- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000019 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000020
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000021- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000022 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000023 which was missing for no apparent reason.
24
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000025- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000026 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
27 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
28
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000029- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
30 types that support garbage collection.
31
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000032- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
33
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000034- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
35 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
36 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
37 Jython.
38
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +000039- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
40
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000041Extension modules
42-----------------
43
44Library
45-------
46
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +000047- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
48
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +000049- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
50 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
51
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +000052- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
53 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
54 when dummy_threading is being used.
55
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +000056- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
57 from a tarfile.
58
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000059- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +000060 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000061
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +000062- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
63 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
64 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
65 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
66
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +000067- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
68 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
69
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +000070- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
71 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
72 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
73 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
74 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
75 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
76 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
77 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
78 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
79 by some other method in progress).
80
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000081- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
82 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
83 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +000084
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +000085- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
86
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +000087- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
88 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
89 AM Kuchling.
90
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000091- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
92 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
93 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
94
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +000095- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
96 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
97 instead of unsigned.
98
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000099- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000100 no longer part of the public API.
101
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000102- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
103 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
104 string methods of the same name).
105
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000106- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
107 SF patch 982681.
108
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000109- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000110 SF patch 945642.
111
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000112- doctest unittest integration improvements:
113
114 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
115
116 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
117 DocTestSuites.
118
119- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
120 that provide thread-local data.
121
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000122- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
123 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
124
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000125- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
126
127- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
128 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
129 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
130
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000131
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000132Tools/Demos
133-----------
134
135Build
136-----
137
138C API
139-----
140
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000141- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
142 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
143
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000144Documentation
145-------------
146
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000147- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000148
149 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
150 assigning thier values
151
152 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
153
154 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
155
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000156- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000157
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000158New platforms
159-------------
160
161Tests
162-----
163
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000164- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000165 platforms that use the Makefile.
166
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000167- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
168 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
169 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
170
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000171Windows
172-------
173
174Mac
175---
176
177
178
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000179What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
180=================================
181
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000182*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000183
184Core and builtins
185-----------------
186
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000187- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
188 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
189 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
190 objects now (one object instead of three).
191
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000192- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
193 Windows DLLs.
194
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000195- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
196
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000197- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
198 a new .pyc magic.
199
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000200- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
201 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
202 be there.
203
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000204- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
205 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
206 the LC_NUMERIC category.
207
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000208- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
209 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
210 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
211
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000212- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
213
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000214- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
215 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
216 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000217
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000218- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
219 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
220
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000221- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
222
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000223- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000224 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000225
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000226- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
227
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000228- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
229
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000230- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
231 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
232
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000233- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
234 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
235 Fixes bug #858016 .
236
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000237- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
238 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
239 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
240
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000241- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
242 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
243 improves their performance (about 35%).
244
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000245- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
246 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
247 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
248
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000249- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
250 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
251 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
252 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
253
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000254- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
255 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
256 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
257 length is not known).
258
259- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
260 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000261 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
262 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000263 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
264
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000265- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
266 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
267
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000268- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
269 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
270 keyword arguments.
271
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000272- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
273 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
274 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
275
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000276- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
277 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
278 cases.
279
280- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
281 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
282 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
283 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
284 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
285 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
286 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
287 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
288 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
289 a release build.
290
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000291- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
292 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
293
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000294- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000295 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000296
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000297- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
298 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
299 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
300 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
301 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
302 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
303 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
304 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
305 destroyed.
306
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000307- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
308 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
309 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
310 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
311 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
312 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
313 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
314 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
315
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000316- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
317 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
318 character other than a space.
319
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000320- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
321 by the function object or by the method object, the function
322 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
323 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
324 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
325 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
326 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
327 attributes with the same name.
328
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000329- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
330 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
331 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
332 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
333 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
334 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
335 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
336 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
337 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
338 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
339 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
340 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
341 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
342 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000343
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000344- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
345 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
346 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
347 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
348 This has been repaired.
349
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000350- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
351
352- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
353
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000354- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
355 over a sequence.
356
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000357- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000358 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000359
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000360- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
361
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000362- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
363 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
364 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
365 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
366 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
367 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
368 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
369 records with equal keys is unchanged).
370
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000371- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
372 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
373 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
374
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000375- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
376 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
377 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
378 freelist.
379
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000380- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
381 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
382
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000383- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
384 number.
385
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000386- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
387 a TypeError exception.
388
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000389- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
390 820195.
391
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000392- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
393 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
394 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
395
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000396- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000397 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
398 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000399
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000400- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
401 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
402 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
403
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000404- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
405 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000406 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000407
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000408- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000409 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
410 the first call.
411
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000412
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000413Extension modules
414-----------------
415
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000416- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
417 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
418
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000419- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
420 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
421 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
422 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
423 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
424 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
425 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000426
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000427- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
428
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000429- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
430
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000431- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
432 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
433
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000434- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
435 fewer false positives.
436
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000437- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
438 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
439
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000440- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000441 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
442
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000443- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000444 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000445 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
446 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
447 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000448
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000449- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
450 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
451 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
452 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
453
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000454- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
455 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
456 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
457 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
458 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
459 #897625.
460
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000461- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
462 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
463
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000464- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
465 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
466 and pops on either side of the deque.
467
468- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
469 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
470
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000471- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
472 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
473 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
474 other functions that expect a function argument.
475
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000476- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
477
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000478- os.getsid was added.
479
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000480- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
481 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
482 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
483
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000484- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
485
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000486- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
487
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000488- readline.clear_history was added.
489
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000490- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
491
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000492- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
493
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000494- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
495
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000496- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
497
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000498- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
499
500- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
501
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000502- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
503
504- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
505
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000506- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
507 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
508 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
509
510- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
511 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
512 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
513 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
514 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
515 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
516 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
517
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000518- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
519 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
520 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
521 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000522
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000523- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000524 iterators from a single iterable.
525
526- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
527 of raising a TypeError exception.
528
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000529- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
530 as parameter.
531
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000532Library
533-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000534
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000535- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
536 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
537 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000538
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000539- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
540 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
541 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000542
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000543- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000544
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000545- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
546 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000547
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000548- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
549 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
550
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000551- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
552
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000553- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000554 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000555
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000556- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
557 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
558
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000559- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
560
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000561- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
562 on cygwin and mingw32.
563
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000564- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
565
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000566- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
567 module.
568
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000569- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
570 installation scheme for all platforms.
571
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000572- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000573 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000574
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000575- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
576 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
577 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
578
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000579- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
580 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
581 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
582
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000583- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
584
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000585- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
586
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000587- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
588 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
589
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000590- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
591 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
592 type pattern with the same value exists.
593
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000594- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
595 when run from the command prompt).
596
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000597- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
598 not taken into consideration when caching value.
599
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000600- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
601 default sort).
602
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000603- Added global runctx function to profile module
604
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000605- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
606
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000607- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
608
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000609- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
610
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000611- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000612 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
613 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
614 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
615 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
616 accordingly.
617
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000618- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
619 decoding standards.
620
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000621- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
622 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
623 called for all requests.
624
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000625- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
626 they are passed to the compiler.
627
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000628- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
629 indent, width and depth.
630
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000631- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
632 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
633
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000634- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
635 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
636
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000637- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
638
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000639- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
640
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000641- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
642
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000643- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
644 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
645
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000646- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000647 for better performance.
648
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000649- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000650
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000651- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
652 a string).
653
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000654- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
655
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000656- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
657
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000658- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
659
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000660- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
661
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000662- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
663 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
664 list of fieldnames.
665
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000666- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
667 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
668
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000669- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
670
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000671- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
672 empty lists.
673
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000674- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
675 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
676 and shelves.
677
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000678- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
679 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
680
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000681- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000682 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
683 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000684
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000685- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
686 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000687 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000688
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000689- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000690 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
691 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
692
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000693- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
694 and removed in Py2.4.
695
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000696- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
697
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000698- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
699
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000700Tools/Demos
701-----------
702
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000703- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
704 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
705
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000706- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
707
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000708- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
709 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
710 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
711 destination in situations where both files are given.
712
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000713- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
714 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
715 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
716 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
717
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000718- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
719
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000720- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
721 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
722 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
723 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
724 now.
725
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000726- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
727 in effect
728
729- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
730 C-c C-h
731
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000732- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
733 -d option was given.
734
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000735Build
736-----
737
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000738- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
739 build under OS X.
740
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000741- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
742 --enable-profiling.
743
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000744- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
745 is configured --with-tsc.
746
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000747- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
748 on AMD64.
749
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000750- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
751 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
752
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000753- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
754 removed.
755
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000756- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
757 supported (see PEP 11).
758
759- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
760
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000761- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
762
763- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
764 (see PEP 11).
765
766- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
767 sizeof(char) must be 1.
768
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000769C API
770-----
771
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000772- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
773 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
774 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
775
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000776- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
777 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
778 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
779 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
780
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000781- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
782 generator objects.
783
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000784- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
785 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000786 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
787 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000788
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000789- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
790 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
791
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000792- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
793 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
794 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
795 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
796 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
797
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000798- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
799 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
800 about 10% faster.
801
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000802- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
803 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
804
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000805- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
806 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
807 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
808 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
809
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000810Windows
811-------
812
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000813- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
814 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
815 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
816 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
817
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000818- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
819 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
820 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
821
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000822
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000823What's New in Python 2.3 final?
824===============================
825
826*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
827
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000828IDLE
829----
830
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000831- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
832 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
833 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
834 context-menu actions.
835
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000836- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
837 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
838 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
839 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
840 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
841 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
842 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
843 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
844 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
845
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000846
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000847What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
848=============================================
849
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000850*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000851
852Core and builtins
853-----------------
854
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000855- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000856 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000857 comment at the end are still unsupported.
858
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000859Extension modules
860-----------------
861
862- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
863 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
864 than once. This has been fixed.
865
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000866- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
867 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
868 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
869 call.
870
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000871- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
872
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000873Library
874-------
875
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000876- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
877 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
878
879- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
880 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
881 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
882 restored.
883
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000884IDLE
885----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000886
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000887- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000888
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000889Build
890-----
891
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000892- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
893 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
894
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000895C API
896-----
897
898Windows
899-------
900
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000901- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
902 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
903
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000904- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
905
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000906Mac
907---
908
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000909- Various fixes to pimp.
910
911- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
912
913- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
914 more problems than it solves.
915
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000916
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000917What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
918=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000919
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000920*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
921
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000922Core and builtins
923-----------------
924
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000925- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
926 by sys.setcheckinterval().
927
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000928- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
929 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000930 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000931
932- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
933 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
934 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000935 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000936
937- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
938 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000939
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000940- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
941 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
942 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
943
944- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000945 770247.
946
947- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000948
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000949Extension modules
950-----------------
951
952- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
953 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
954
955- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
956
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000957- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
958
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000959- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
960 contained within the _strptime module.
961
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000962- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
963 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
964
965- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000966 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
967
968- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
969 the find_class attribute, if present.
970
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000971- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000972
973 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
974 (SF bug 763298).
975
976 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000977 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
978 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
979 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000980
981 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
982
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000983Library
984-------
985
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000986- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
987
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000988- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
989 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
990 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
991 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
992 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
993 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
994 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
995 or Tester().
996
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000997- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
998 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
999 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1000 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1001 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1002 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1003 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1004 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1005 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001006
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001007 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001008
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001009- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1010 weren't before was an oversight.
1011
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001012- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1013 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1014
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001015- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1016 when there are no lines.
1017
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001018- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1019 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1020
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001021- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1022 to child processes.
1023
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001024- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1025
1026- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1027
1028- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1029 xmlrpclib.
1030
1031- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1032 responses.
1033
1034- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1035 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1036
1037- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1038 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1039 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1040
1041- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1042 used as patterns.
1043
1044- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1045 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1046 than Tk 8.3.
1047
1048- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1049
1050- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001051
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001052Tools/Demos
1053-----------
1054
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001055- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1056
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001057- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1058
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001059- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001060
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001061Build
1062-----
1063
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001064- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1065
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001066- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1067
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001068- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1069 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001070
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001071- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1072 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1073 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001074
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001075C API
1076-----
1077
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001078- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1079 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1080
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001081Windows
1082-------
1083
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001084- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1085 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1086 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1087 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1088 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1089 Python exception ::
1090
1091 thread.error: can't start new thread
1092
1093 is raised now.
1094
1095- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1096 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1097 instead of from DLL teardown.
1098
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001099Mac
1100---
1101
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001102- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001103 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001104 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1105 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1106 the executable in the bundle.
1107
1108- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001109
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001110- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1111
1112- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1113 on Panther.
1114
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001115What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1116================================
1117
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001118*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001119
1120Core and builtins
1121-----------------
1122
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001123- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1124 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1125 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1126 with the -i option.
1127
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001128- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1129 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1130
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001131- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1132 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1133
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001134- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1135 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1136 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1137 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1138 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1139 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1140 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1141 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1142 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1143 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1144 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1145 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1146 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001147
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001148- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1149 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1150 embedded in a lambda expression.
1151
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001152- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1153 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1154 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1155 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1156 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1157
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001158- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1159 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1160 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1161
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001162- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1163 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1164
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001165- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1166 It's writable again.
1167
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001168- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1169 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1170 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001171 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001172
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001173- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1174 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1175 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1176
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001177Extension modules
1178-----------------
1179
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001180- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1181 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1182
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001183- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1184 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1185 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1186 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1187
1188- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1189 collection.
1190
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001191- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1192 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1193 unique within a single program run.
1194
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001195- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1196 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1197
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001198- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1199 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1200
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001201- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1202 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001203
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001204- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1205
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001206- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1207 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1208
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001209- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1210 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1211 for many BSD-derived systems.
1212
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001213
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001214Library
1215-------
1216
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001217- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1218 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1219 primary ones:
1220
1221 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1222 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1223 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1224
1225 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1226 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1227 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1228 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1229 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1230 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1231
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001232- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1233 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1234 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1235 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1236 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1237 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1238 argument.
1239
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001240- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1241 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1242 in the archive.
1243
1244- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1245 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1246
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001247- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1248 569574).
1249
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001250- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1251 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1252 no more.
1253
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001254- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1255 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1256 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1257 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1258 code coverage.
1259
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001260- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1261 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1262 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001263 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1264 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001265
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001266- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1267 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1268 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001269 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001270
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001271- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1272
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001273- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1274 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1275 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1276 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1277
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001278- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1279 handling.
1280
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001281- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1282 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1283
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001284- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1285 in socket.py.
1286
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001287- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1288
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001289- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1290 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1291 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1292 opener with proxy support.
1293
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001294- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1295
1296- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1297
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001298Tools/Demos
1299-----------
1300
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001301- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1302
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001303- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1304
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001305- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1306 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001307
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001308- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1309 files.
1310
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001311Build
1312-----
1313
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001314- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001315 different root directory.
1316
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001317C API
1318-----
1319
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001320- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1321 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1322 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1323 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1324 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1325 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1326 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1327 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1328 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1329 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1330
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001331- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1332 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1333 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1334 from Python.
1335
1336
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001337New platforms
1338-------------
1339
1340None this time.
1341
1342Tests
1343-----
1344
1345- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1346 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1347
1348Windows
1349-------
1350
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001351- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1352
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001353- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1354 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1355 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1356 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1357 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1358 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1359 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1360 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1361 that's what it's for.
1362
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001363Mac
1364---
1365
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001366- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1367 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1368 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1369 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001370- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1371 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1372- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001373
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001374SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1375------------------------------------
1376
1377430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1378598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1379622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1380661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1381683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1382697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1383713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1384724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1385727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1386729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1387730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1388731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1389732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1390733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1391735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1392740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1393744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1394745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1395747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1396749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1397751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1398753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1399755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1400757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1401760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1402
1403
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001404What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1405================================
1406
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001407*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001408
1409Core and builtins
1410-----------------
1411
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001412- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1413 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1414
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001415- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1416 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1417 and cannot be strings).
1418
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001419- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1420 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1421 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1422 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1423
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001424- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1425 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1426 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1427 Python itself.
1428
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001429- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1430 the referenced object, if it has one.
1431
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001432- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1433 the thread started at
1434 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1435
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001436- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1437 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1438 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1439 placed on a list index.
1440
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001441- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1442 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1443 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1444 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1445
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001446- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1447 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1448 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1449 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1450 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1451 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1452 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1453
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001454- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1455 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1456 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1457 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1458 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1459
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001460- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1461 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001462
1463- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1464 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1465 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1466 #693195.)
1467
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001468- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1469 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001470
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001471- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001472 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001473 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1474 interpreter executions, would fail.
1475
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001476- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001477 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001478 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001479
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001480Extension modules
1481-----------------
1482
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001483- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1484 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1485 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1486 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1487
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001488- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1489 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1490
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001491- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1492 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1493 and Greg Chapman.)
1494
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001495- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1496 recursively.
1497
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001498- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001499 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1500 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1501 leaks.
1502
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001503- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1504
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001505- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1506 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1507 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1508 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1509 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1510 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1511 #705836.
1512
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001513- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001514 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1515
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001516- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1517 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1518 See SF bug #692416.
1519
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001520- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1521 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1522
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001523- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1524 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1525 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001526
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001527- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001528 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1529 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1530
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001531- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1532 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1533 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1534 timeouts to work properly.
1535
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001536Library
1537-------
1538
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001539- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1540 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1541 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1542 future release.
1543
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001544- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1545 for querying platform dependent features.
1546
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001547- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001548
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001549- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1550 pickle protocol versions.
1551
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001552- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1553 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1554 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1555
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001556- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1557
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001558- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1559 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1560 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1561 modules.
1562
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001563- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1564 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1565 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1566
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001567- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1568 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1569
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001570- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1571 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1572 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1573
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001574- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001575 MS Office extensions.
1576
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001577- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1578 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1579
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001580- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1581 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1582
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001583- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1584 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1585 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1586 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1587 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1588 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1589
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001590- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1591 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1592 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001593
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001594- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1595 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1596 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1597
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001598- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1599
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001600- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1601 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1602 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1603
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001604Tools/Demos
1605-----------
1606
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001607- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1608 See the module docstring for details.
1609
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001610Build
1611-----
1612
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001613- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1614 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001615
1616C API
1617-----
1618
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001619- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1620
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001621- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1622 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1623 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1624
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001625- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1626 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001627
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001628 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1629 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1630 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001631
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001632- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001633 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1634
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001635- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1636 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1637 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001638
1639New platforms
1640-------------
1641
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001642None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001643
1644Tests
1645-----
1646
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001647- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1648 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001649
1650Windows
1651-------
1652
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001653- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1654 function.
1655
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001656- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1657 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001658
1659Mac
1660---
1661
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001662- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1663 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001664
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001665- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1666 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001667
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001668- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1669 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1670 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001671
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001672- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001673 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1674 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001675
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001676- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1677 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001678
1679
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001680What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1681=================================
1682
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001683*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001684
1685Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001686-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001687
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001688- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1689 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1690 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1691
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001692- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1693 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1694 (SF patch #664376.)
1695
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001696- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1697 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1698 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1699 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1700 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1701 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001702 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001703
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001704- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1705 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1706 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1707 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001708 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001709
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001710- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1711 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1712 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1713 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1714 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1715 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1716 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1717 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1718 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1719 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1720 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1721
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001722- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1723 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1724 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1725 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1726 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1727 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1728
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001729- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1730 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1731
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001732- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1733 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1734 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1735 case.)
1736
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001737- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1738 passed as unicode strings.
1739
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001740- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1741 See SF bug #683467.
1742
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001743- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1744 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1745
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001746- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1747
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001748- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1749
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001750- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1751 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1752 arguments.
1753
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001754- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1755 See SF bug #667147.
1756
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001757- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001758 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001759 See SF bug #676155.
1760
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001761- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001762 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001763 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1764 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1765 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1766 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1767 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1768 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001769
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001770Extension modules
1771-----------------
1772
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001773- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1774 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1775 tp_as_number pointer.
1776
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001777- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1778 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1779 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1780 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1781 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1782
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001783- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1784
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001785- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1786
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001787- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001788 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001789 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1790 patch #678531.)
1791
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001792- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1793 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1794
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001795- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1796 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1797
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001798- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1799
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001800- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1801 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1802 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1803
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001804- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1805
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001806- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1807 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1808
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001809- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001810
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001811- datetime changes:
1812
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001813 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1814
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001815 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1816 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1817 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1818 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1819 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1820 now.
1821
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001822 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001823 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1824 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001825
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001826 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001827 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001828 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1829 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1830 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1831 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001832
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001833 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1834 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1835 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001836 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1837
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001838 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1839 by a later example coded by Guido.
1840
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001841 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001842 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1843 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1844 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001845 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1846 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1847
1848 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1849 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1850 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1851 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1852 tzinfo subclass instance.
1853
1854 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1855 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1856 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1857 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1858 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1859 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1860 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1861 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001862
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001863 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1864 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1865 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1866 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1867 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001868 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1869
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001870 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001871
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001872 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1873 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1874 as a naive datetime object.
1875
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001876 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1877 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1878 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1879
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001880 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1881 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1882 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1883 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1884 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1885 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1886 comparison.
1887
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001888 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1889 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1890 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1891 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001892 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001893
1894 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001895
1896 and ::
1897
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001898 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1899
1900 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1901 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1902 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1903 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1904
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001905 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1906 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1907 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1908 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1909 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1910
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001911 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1912 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001913 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1914 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001915
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001916Library
1917-------
1918
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001919- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1920 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1921
1922- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1923 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1924 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1925 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1926 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1927 See PEP 307 for details.
1928
1929- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1930 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1931
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001932- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1933 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001934 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001935 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1936 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001937 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001938
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001939- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1940 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1941
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001942- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1943 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1944 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1945
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001946- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1947
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001948- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1949 exception.
1950
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001951- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1952 class.
1953
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001954- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1955 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1956 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1957
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001958- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1959 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1960
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001961- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001962 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1963 See SF bug #659228.
1964
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001965- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1966 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1967 See SF patch #651082.
1968
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001969- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001970
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001971- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1972 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1973
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001974- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001975 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001976
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001977- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1978 DOS paths from other platforms.
1979
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001980Tools/Demos
1981-----------
1982
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001983- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1984 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1985 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1986 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1987 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1988 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1989 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1990 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1991 example:
1992
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001993 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1994 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001995
1996 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1997
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001998
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001999Build
2000-----
2001
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002002- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2003 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2004 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002005 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2006
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002007 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2008
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002009- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2010 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2011 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2012 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2013 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2014 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2015 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2016 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2017 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2018
2019- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2020 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2021 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2022 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2023
2024- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2025 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2026
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002027C API
2028-----
2029
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002030- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2031 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002032
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002033- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2034 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2035 tp_as_number pointer.
2036
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002037- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2038 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2039 (SF #681367)
2040
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002041- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2042 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2043 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2044 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002045
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002046Tests
2047-----
2048
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002049- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002050 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2051 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2052 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2053 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2054 pydoc.)
2055
2056- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2057
2058- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002059
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002060Windows
2061-------
2062
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002063- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2064 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2065 time).
2066
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002067- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2068 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2069
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002070- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2071 release without strong cryptography.
2072
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002073- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002074 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002075
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002076- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2077 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2078
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002079Mac
2080---
2081
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002082- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2083 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002084
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002085- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2086 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2087 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002088
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002089- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2090 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002091
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002092- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2093 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2094 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2095 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002096
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002097- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002098 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2099 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2100 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002101
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002102
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002103What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002104=================================
2105
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002106*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002107
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002108Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002109--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002110
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002111- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2112
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002113- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2114 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002115 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002116 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002117 a different meaning than before.
2118
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002119- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002120 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002121 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002122
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002123- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002124 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002125 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002126
2127- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2128 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2129 and deallocation.
2130
2131- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2132 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2133
2134- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2135 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2136 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2137 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2138 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2139
2140- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2141 now detected by the garbage collector.
2142
2143- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2144 [SF bug 519621]
2145
2146- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2147 identifier.
2148
2149- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2150 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2151 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2152 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2153 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2154 [SF bug 563060]
2155
2156- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2157 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2158 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2159 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2160 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2161
2162- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2163 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2164 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2165
2166- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2167
2168- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2169 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2170 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2171 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2172 state of the slots would be lost.)
2173
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002174Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002175-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002176
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002177- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002178 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2179 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2180 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2181 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002182 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2183 Jython 2.1.
2184
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002185- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002186 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002187 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2188 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2189 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2190 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2191 these, see PEP 302.
2192
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002193- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2194 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2195 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2196
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002197- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2198 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2199 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2200
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002201- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2202 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2203 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2204
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002205- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2206 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2207 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2208 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2209 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2210 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2211 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2212 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2213 releases or implementations.
2214
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002215- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002216 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2217 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002218
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002219- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2220 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2221
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002222- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2223 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2224 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2225
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002226- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2227 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2228
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002229- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2230 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002231 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2232 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002233
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002234- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2235 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2236 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2237 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2238 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2239
2240 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2241 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2242 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2243 pattern.
2244
2245 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2246 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2247 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2248 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2249
2250 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2251 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2252 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2253 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2254 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2255 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2256
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002257- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2258 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2259 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2260 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2261 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2262 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2263 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2264 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002265
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002266- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2267 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2268 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2269 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2270 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002271 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2272 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2273 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2274 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2275 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2276 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2277 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002278
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002279- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2280 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2281
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002282- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2283 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2284 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2285 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2286 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2287 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2288 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2289 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2290 to Zack Weinberg!
2291
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002292- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2293 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2294 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2295 type. This has been fixed now.
2296
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002297- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2298 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2299 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2300
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002301- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2302 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2303 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2304 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2305 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2306 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2307 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2308 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002309 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002310
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002311- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2312 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2313 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002314
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002315- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2316 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2317 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2318 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2319 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2320 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2321 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2322 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002323 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002324 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2325 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2326
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002327- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2328 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2329 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2330 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2331 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2332 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2333 this.)
2334
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002335- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2336 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002337 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002338 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002339 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2340 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002341 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2342 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002343
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002344- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2345 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2346 currently running.
2347
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002348- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2349 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2350 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2351 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2352
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002353- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2354 as directory names.
2355
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002356- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2357 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2358
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002359- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2360 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2361
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002362- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002363 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2364 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002365
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002366- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2367 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2368 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2369 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2370 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2371
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002372- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2373 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2374 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2375 removed.
2376
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002377- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2378 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2379 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2380
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002381- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2382 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2383 to __debug__.
2384
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002385- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2386 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2387 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2388
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002389- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2390 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2391 deprecated now.
2392
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002393- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2394 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2395 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002396
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002397- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2398 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2399 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2400 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2401 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002402
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002403- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2404 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2405
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002406- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2407 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2408 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002409 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002410 is backward compatible.
2411
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002412- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2413 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2414 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2415 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2416 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2417
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002418- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2419 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2420 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2421 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2422 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2423 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002424
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002425- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2426 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2427
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002428- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2429 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2430
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002431- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2432 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2433 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2434 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2435 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2436
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002437- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2438 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2439 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2440
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002441- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002442 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2443
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002444- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2445 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2446 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002447
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002448- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2449 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2450
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002451- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2452 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2453 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2454
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002455- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2456
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002457Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002458-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002459
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002460- Added three operators to the operator module:
2461 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2462 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2463 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2464
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002465- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2466
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002467- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2468 archives.
2469
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002470- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2471 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2472 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2473
2474 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2475
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002476- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2477 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2478 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002479 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002480
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002481- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2482 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2483 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2484 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002485 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2486 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2487 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2488 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002489
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002490- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2491 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002492
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002493- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2494
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002495- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2496 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2497
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002498- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2499 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2500 supported.
2501
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002502- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2503
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002504- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2505 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002506
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002507- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2508 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2509
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002510- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2511
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002512- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2513 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2514
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002515- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2516 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2517 functions but callable type objects.
2518
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002519- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002520 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002521 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002522
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002523- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2524 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002525
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002526- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2527 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002528
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002529- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2530 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2531 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2532 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2533
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002534- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2535 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002536
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002537- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2538 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2539 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2540 and __imul__.
2541
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002542- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002543 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2544 is called.
2545
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002546- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2547 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2548 interpreter was compiled.
2549
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002550- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2551 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2552 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002553 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002554 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2555 1, not 2.
2556
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002557- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2558 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2559 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2560 limit.
2561
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002562- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2563 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2564 bug #623464.
2565
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002566- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2567 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2568 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2569 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2570
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002571Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002572-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002573
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002574- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2575
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002576- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2577 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2578 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2579 with Python 2.3a2.
2580
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002581- os.path exposes getctime.
2582
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002583- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002584 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002585 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002586 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002587 unit tests of floating point results.
2588
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002589- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2590 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2591 has been increased.
2592
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002593- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2594 executed.
2595
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002596- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2597 postinstallation script.
2598
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002599- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2600 test the current module.
2601
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002602- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002603 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2604 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2605 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2606 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2607
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002608- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002609 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002610 Ward's Optik package.
2611
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002612- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2613 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2614 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2615 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2616
2617- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2618 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002619 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002620
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002621- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2622 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2623 shelf are binary pickles.
2624
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002625- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2626 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2627
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002628- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2629 modules are iterators now.
2630
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002631- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2632 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2633 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2634 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2635 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2636 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002637
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002638- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2639 with their entity value.
2640
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002641- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2642
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002643- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2644 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002645
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002646- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2647 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002648 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002649
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002650- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2651 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2652 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2653 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2654 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2655 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2656 main():
2657
2658 import locale
2659 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2660
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002661- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2662 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2663
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002664- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2665 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2666 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2667 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2668 to the new standard.
2669
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002670- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2671 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2672 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2673 an extension to the database.
2674
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002675- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2676 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2677 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2678 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002679 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002680
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002681- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002682 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002683
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002684- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2685 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2686 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2687 bounded integers.
2688
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002689- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2690 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2691 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2692 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2693 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2694 in existence.
2695
2696 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2697 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2698 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2699 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2700 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2701 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2702
2703 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2704 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2705 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2706 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2707
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002708- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2709 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2710 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2711
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002712- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2713
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002714- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2715 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2716 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2717 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2718
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002719- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2720 argument.
2721
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002722- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2723 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2724 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2725 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2726 [SF patch 560794].
2727
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002728- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2729 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2730 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002731 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2732 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2733 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002734
2735- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2736 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002737
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002738- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2739 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2740 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2741 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002742
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002743- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2744 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2745 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2746 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2747 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2748
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002749- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002750
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002751- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2752
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002753- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2754 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2755 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2756 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2757 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2758 identical to None.
2759
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002760- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2761 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2762 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2763 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2764 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2765 results now.
2766
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002767- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2768 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2769
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002770- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2771 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2772 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2773 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2774 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2775 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2776 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2777 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2778
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002779- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2780
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002781- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2782 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2783
2784- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2785 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2786 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2787 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2788 and other systems.
2789
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002790- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2791 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2792 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2793 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 +00002794 work well with these.
2795
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002796- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2797
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002798- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002799 connections.
2800
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002801- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2802 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2803 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2804
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002805- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2806 sets
2807
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002808- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2809 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2810 name.
2811
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002812- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2813 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2814 passed in.
2815
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002816- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002817 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002818 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2819 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002820
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002821- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2822
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002823- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2824
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002825- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2826 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2827 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2828
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002829- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2830 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2831 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2832 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002833 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002834
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002835- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002836 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002837 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002838
2839- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2840 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2841 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2842
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002843- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002844 the value of its expression argument.
2845
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002846- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2847 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2848 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2849
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002850- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2851 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2852 skipstone browser was included.
2853
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002854- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2855 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2856
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002857Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002858-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002859
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002860- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2861 names in addition to accepting file names.
2862
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002863- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2864 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2865 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2866 still used and useful.)
2867
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002868- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2869 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2870 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2871 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002872
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002873- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2874 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2875 the generated binary.
2876
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002877Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002878-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002879
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002880- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2881
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002882- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2883 except in the hands of experts.
2884
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002885- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002886 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2887 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2888 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002889
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002890- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2891 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2892 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2893 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2894 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2895 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2896 builds.
2897
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002898- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2899 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2900 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2901 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2902 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2903 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2904 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2905 new type.
2906
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002907- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002908
2909 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2910 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2911 positive infinities.
2912
2913 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2914 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2915 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2916 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2917 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2918 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2919 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2920
2921 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2922
2923 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2924
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002925- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2926 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2927 size of the executable.
2928
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002929- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2930 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2931 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2932 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002933
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002934- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2935
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002936- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2937 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2938 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002939
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002940- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2941 well as Unix.
2942
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002943- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2944 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2945 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2946 modules in the README file for details.
2947
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002948C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002949-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002950
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002951- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2952 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002953 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002954 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002955 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002956
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002957- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2958 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2959 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2960 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2961 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2962 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002963 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002964 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2965 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2966 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2967 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2968 aligned.)
2969
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002970- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2971 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2972 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2973
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002974- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2975 level.
2976
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002977- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2978 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2979 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2980 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2981 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2982
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002983- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2984 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2985 code.
2986
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002987- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2988 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2989 adjusting for negative indices.
2990
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002991- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2992 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2993 object.
2994
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002995- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2996 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2997 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2998
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002999- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3000 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003001
3002- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3003
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003004- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3005 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3006 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3007 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3008
3009- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3010
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003011- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003012
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003013- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003014 without going through the buffer API.
3015
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003016- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003017
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003018- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3019 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3020 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3021 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3022
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003023- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3024 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3025
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003026- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003027 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3028
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003029New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003030-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003031
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003032- OpenVMS is now supported.
3033
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003034- AtheOS is now supported.
3035
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003036- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3037
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003038- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3039
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003040Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003041-----
3042
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003043- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3044 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3045 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003046
3047Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003048-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003049
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003050- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3051 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3052 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3053 bugs.
3054 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003055 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003056 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3057 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003058 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003059
3060- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003061 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003062
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003063- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3064 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3065
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003066- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3067 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003068 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003069 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3070
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003071- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3072 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3073 use files" uninstall option).
3074
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003075- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3076
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003077- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3078 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3079
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003080- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3081 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3082 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3083
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003084- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3085 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3086 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3087 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3088 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003089 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3090 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3091 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003092
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003093- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003094 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003095 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3096 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3097 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3098 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3099 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3100 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3101 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3102 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3103 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3104 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3105 work around.
3106
3107- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3108 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3109 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3110 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3111 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3112 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3113 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3114 specified with O_CREAT too).
3115
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003116Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003117----
3118
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003119- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003120
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003121- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3122 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3123 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3124
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003125- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3126 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3127 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3128
3129- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3130 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3131 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3132 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3133 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3134 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3135 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3136 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003137
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003138- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3139 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3140 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003141
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003142- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3143 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3144 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3145 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3146 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003147
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003148- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3149 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3150 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003151
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003152- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3153 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003154
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003155- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3156 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3157 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3158 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3159 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003160
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003161- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3162 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3163 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3164
3165- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3166 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3167 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003168
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003169- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3170 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3171 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3172 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003173 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003174
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003175- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3176 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003177
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003178- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3179 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003180
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003181- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003182 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003183 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3184 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003185
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003186
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003187What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003188===============================
3189
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003190*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3191
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003192Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003193--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003194
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003195- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3196 with a custom metaclass.
3197
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003198Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003199-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003200
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003201- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3202 are proxies.
3203
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003204Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003205-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003206
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003207- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3208 very short strings.
3209
3210- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3211 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3212 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3213 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3214 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3215
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003216Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003217-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003218
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003219- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3220 close or delete time).
3221
3222- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3223 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3224
3225- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3226
3227- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003228 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003229
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003230Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003231-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003232
3233Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003234-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003235
3236C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003237-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003238
3239New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003240-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003241
3242Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003243-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003244
3245Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003246-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003247
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003248- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3249
3250- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3251 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3252
3253- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3254 deleted at process exit time.
3255
3256- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3257 in backslash.
3258
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003259Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003260----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003261
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003262- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3263 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3264 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3265
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003266
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003267What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003268===========================
3269
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003270*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3271
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003272Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003273--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003274
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003275- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3276 been extensively updated. See
3277
3278 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3279
3280 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3281
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003282- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3283 deleted!
3284
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003285- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3286 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3287 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3288 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3289 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3290
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003291- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3292
3293 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3294 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3295
3296 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3297 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3298 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3299 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3300 supported anyway.
3301
3302 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3303 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3304
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003305- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3306 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3307 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3308 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3309 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003310
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003311- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3312 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3313 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3314
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003315Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003316-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003317
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003318- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3319 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3320 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3321 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3322 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3323 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003324 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3325 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3326 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3327 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003328
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003329- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3330 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3331 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3332
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003333Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003334-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003335
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003336- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3337
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003338Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003339-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003340
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003341- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3342 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3343 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3344 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3345 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3346 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3347
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003348- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3349
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003350- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3351
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003352- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3353
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003354- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3355 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3356 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3357
3358- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3359
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003360Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003361-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003362
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003363- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3364 off a search on Google.
3365
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003366Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003367-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003368
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003369- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3370 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3371 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3372 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3373 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3374 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3375 other platforms should do likewise.
3376
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003377- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3378 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3379 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3380
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003381C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003382-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003383
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003384- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3385 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3386 producing key-value pairs.
3387
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003388- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003389 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003390 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3391 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3392 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3393 previously went unchallenged.
3394
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003395New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003396-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003397
3398Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003399-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003400
3401Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003402-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003403
3404Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003405----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003406
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003407- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3408 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003409
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003410- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3411 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3412 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3413 home.
3414
3415
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003416What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003417===========================
3418
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003419*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3420
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003421Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003422--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003423
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003424- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3425 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003426
3427 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003428 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003429
3430 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3431 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003432 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003433 This needs to be documented.
3434
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003435- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3436 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3437
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003438- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3439 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3440 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3441
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003442- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3443 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3444
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003445- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3446 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3447 class forbids it).
3448
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003449- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3450 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3451 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3452
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003453- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3454
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003455Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003456-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003457
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003458- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3459 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003460 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003461
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003462- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3463 (like 1 + '').
3464
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003465Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003466-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003467
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003468- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3469 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3470 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3471 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003472 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003473 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3474
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003475- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3476 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3477 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3478 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3479
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003480- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3481 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003482 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3483 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3484 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003485
3486- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3487 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003488
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003489- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3490 bytes on its input.
3491
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003492Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003493-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003494
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003495- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003496 convenience function.
3497
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003498- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3499 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3500 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003501 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3502 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3503 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3504 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3505 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3506 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003507
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003508- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3509 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3510 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3511 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3512
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003513- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3514 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3515 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3516
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003517- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3518 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3519 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3520 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3521
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003522- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3523 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003524 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003525 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3526 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3527 new -l and -e options.
3528
3529- statcache is now deprecated.
3530
3531- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3532 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003533 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003534 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3535 time properly taken into account.
3536
3537- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3538 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3539 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3540 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3541
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003542Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003543-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003544
3545Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003546-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003547
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003548- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3549 is built with libdb3 if available.
3550
3551- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3552
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003553C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003554-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003555
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003556- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3557 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3558 PySequence_Size().
3559
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003560- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3561
3562- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3563 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3564 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3565
3566- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3567 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3568
3569- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3570 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3571
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003572New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003573-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003574
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003575- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3576 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3577
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003578- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3579 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3580
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003581- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3582
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003583Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003584-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003585
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003586- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3587 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3588
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003589Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003590-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003591
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003592Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003593----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003594
3595- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3596 removed completely in the next release.
3597
3598- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3599 OSX.
3600
3601- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3602 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3603
3604- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3605
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003606
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003607What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003608===========================
3609
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003610*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3611
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003612Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003613--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003614
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003615- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003616 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003617 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003618 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3619 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003620 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3621 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003622 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3623 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003624
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003625- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3626 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3627
3628- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3629 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3630
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003631Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003632-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003633
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003634- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3635 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3636 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3637 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3638 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3639 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3640 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3641 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3642
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003643- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3644 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3645 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3646 example).
3647
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003648- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003649 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003650 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003651 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003652
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003653- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3654 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3655 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003656 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003657
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003658- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3659 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3660 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3661 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3662 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3663 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3664
3665 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3666
3667 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3668
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003669Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003670-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003671
3672- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3673
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003674- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3675
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003676- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3677 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003678
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003679- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3680 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3681 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3682 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3683 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3684 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003685 attributes.
3686
3687- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3688 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3689 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003690
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003691- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3692 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3693 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003694
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003695- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3696 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3697 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003698 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3699 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3700
3701- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3702 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003703
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003704Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003705-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003706
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003707- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3708 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3709
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003710- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3711 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3712 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3713 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3714
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003715- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3716 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3717 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3718 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3719
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003720 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3721 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3722 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3723 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3724 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3725 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3726 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3727 without losing information).
3728
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003729- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003730 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3731 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3732 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3733 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3734 module).
3735
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003736 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003737 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3738 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3739 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3740 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003741
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003742- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003743 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3744 encoding.
3745
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003746- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3747 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3748
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003749- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003750 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3751
3752- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3753 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3754 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3755 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3756
3757- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3758
3759- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3760 ON, and OFF.
3761
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003762- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3763 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3764
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003765Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003766-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003767
3768- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3769 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3770 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003771
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003772- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3773 been added: -X and -E.
3774
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003775Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003776-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003777
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003778- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3779 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3780
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003781C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003782-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003783
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003784- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3785 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3786 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3787 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3788 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3789
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003790- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3791 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3792 as long) arguments.
3793
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003794- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3795 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3796 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3797 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3798 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3799 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3800
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003801- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3802 input.
3803
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003804New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003805-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003806
3807Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003808-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003809
3810Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003811-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003812
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003813- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3814 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3815 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3816
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003817- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3818 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3819 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003820 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003821
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003822 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3823 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3824 import signal
3825 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003826
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003827 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003828 while 1:
3829 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003830 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003831 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3832 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3833 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3834 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003835
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003836
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003837What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3838===========================
3839
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003840*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3841
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003842Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003843--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003844
3845- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3846 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3847 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3848
3849- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3850 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3851 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3852 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3853 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3854 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3855 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003856
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003857- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003858 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003859 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3860 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3861 associate a docstring with a property.
3862
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003863- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3864 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3865 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3866 other built-in object types.
3867
3868- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3869 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3870 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3871 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3872 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3873
3874- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3875 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3876
3877- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3878 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003879 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003880 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3881 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3882 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3883 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3884 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3885
3886- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3887 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3888 class.
3889
3890- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3891 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3892 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3893 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3894
3895- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3896 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3897 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3898 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3899
3900- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3901 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3902
3903- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3904 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3905 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3906 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3907 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003908 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003909 with the same value as s.
3910
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003911- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3912
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003913Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003914----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003915
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003916- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3917
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003918- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3919 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3920 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3921 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3922 objects.
3923
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003924- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3925 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003926 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3927 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3928
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003929- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3930 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3931 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3932
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003933Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003934-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003935
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003936- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3937 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3938 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3939 by the instances.
3940
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003941- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3942 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3943 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3944
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003945- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3946 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3947 before the entire comparison is complete.
3948
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003949- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3950 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3951 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3952
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003953- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3954 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3955 getwriter().
3956
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003957- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3958 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3959
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003960- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003961 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3962 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3963
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003964- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3965 iterable object.
3966
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003967- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3968 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003969
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003970- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3971 authentication.
3972
3973- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3974 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003975
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003976- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003977 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3978 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3979 a sample driver.)
3980
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003981Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003982-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003983
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003984- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3985 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3986 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3987 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3988 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3989 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3990 kernel has large file support.
3991
3992- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3993 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3994 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3995 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3996 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3997
3998- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3999 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4000 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4001
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004002C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004003-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004004
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004005- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4006 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4007
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004008New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004009-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004010
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004011- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4012 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4013
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004014Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004015-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004016
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004017- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4018 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4019 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4020 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4021 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4022
4023- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4024 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4025 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4026 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4027
4028- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4029 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4030
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004031Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004032-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004033
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004034- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004035 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4036 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004037
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004038
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004039What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4040===========================
4041
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004042*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4043
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004044Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004045----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004046
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004047- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4048 big to represent as a C double.
4049
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004050- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4051 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4052 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4053 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4054 restriction).
4055
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004056- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4057 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4058 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4059 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4060 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4061
4062 >>> dir([])
4063 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4064 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4065 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4066 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4067 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4068 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4069 'reverse', 'sort']
4070
4071 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4072
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004073- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004074 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4075 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4076 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4077 OverflowError exception.
4078
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004079- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004080 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004081 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4082 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4083 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4084 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4085 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004086 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004087 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4088 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4089
4090 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4091 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4092 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4093 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004094
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004095- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004096 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4097 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4098 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4099 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4100 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4101 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4102 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4103 once it is created.
4104
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004105- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4106 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4107 (key, value) pairs.
4108
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004109- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004110 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4111 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4112
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004113- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4114 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4115 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4116 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4117 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004118
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004119- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004120 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4121 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4122
4123 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4124
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004125- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004126 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4127
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004128Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004129-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004130
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004131- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004132 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4133 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004134
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004135- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4136 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4137 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4138 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4139 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4140 in this area anymore).
4141
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004142- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4143 threading.Timer.
4144
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004145- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4146 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4147
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004148- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004149 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4150
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004151- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004152 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4153 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4154 converted to Python longs.
4155
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004156- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004157 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4158
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004159- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4160 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4161 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4162
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004163Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004164-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004165
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004166- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4167 division operators as per PEP 238.
4168
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004169Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004170-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004171
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004172- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4173 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4174 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4175 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4176
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004177C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004178-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004179
4180- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004181
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004182- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4183 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004184 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004185
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004186 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4187 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004188 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004189 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004190
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004191- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004192 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4193 module:
4194
4195 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004196
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004197 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4198 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004199
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004200 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4201 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004202
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004203 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4204
4205 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4206
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004207- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004208 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4209 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4210 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004211
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004212New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004213-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004214
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004215- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4216 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4217 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4218 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4219 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004220
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004221Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004222-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004223
4224Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004225-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004226
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004227- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4228 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4229 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4230 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004231 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4232 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4233 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4234 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4235 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004236
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004237- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004238 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4239
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004240
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004241What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4242===========================
4243
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004244*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4245
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004246Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004247-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004248
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004249- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4250 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4251
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004252- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4253 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4254 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004255
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004256- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4257 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4258 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4259 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004260
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004261- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4262
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004263- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004264
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004265Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004266-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004267
4268- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004269 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004270 the module docstring for details.
4271
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004272Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004273-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004274
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004275- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004276 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4277 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4278 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004279
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004280- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4281 Nick Mathewson.
4282
4283Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004284----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004285
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004286- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4287 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4288 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4289 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4290 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4291 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4292 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4293 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4294
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004295- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4296 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4297 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4298 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4299
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004300- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4301 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4302 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4303 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4304 come a long way).
4305
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004306- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4307 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4308 write filters for these warnings).
4309
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004310- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4311 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4312 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4313 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4314 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4315
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004316- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4317 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4318 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4319 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4320 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4321 older distribution.
4322
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004323Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004324-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004325
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004326- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4327 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004328 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004329
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004330- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4331 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4332 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4333
4334- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4335
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004336- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4337
4338- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4339
4340- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4341
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004342- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004343
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004344- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4345
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004346New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004347-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004348
4349C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004350-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004351
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004352- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4353 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4354 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4355 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4356 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4357 against buffer overruns.
4358
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004359- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004360 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4361 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004362 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4363 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4364 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4365
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004366- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4367 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4368 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4369 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4370 deprecated.
4371
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004372Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004373-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004374
4375- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4376 relevant is found.
4377
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004378
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004379What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004380===========================
4381
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004382*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4383
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004384Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004385----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004386
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004387- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4388 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4389 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4390 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4391 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4392 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4393 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4394 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004395 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004396 repaired.
4397
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004398- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004399 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004400 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4401 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4402 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4403 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4404 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4405 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4406 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4407 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4408
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004409- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4410 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4411 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4412 leading BMO character).
4413
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004414- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4415 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4416 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4417
4418 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4419 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4420 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004421
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004422 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4423 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4424 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4425 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4426 for various simple to use conversions.
4427
4428 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4429 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4430
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004431 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4432 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4433 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4434 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4435 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4436 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4437 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4438 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4439 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4440 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4441 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4442 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4443 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4444 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4445 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004446
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004447- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4448 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4449 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004450 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004451 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004452
4453 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004454 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4455 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4456 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4457 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4458 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004459 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4460 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004461
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004462 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4463 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4464 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004465 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004466
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004467- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4468 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4469 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4470 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4471 floating arithmetic,
4472
4473 x = 9007199254740992.0
4474 print long(x)
4475
4476 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4477 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4478 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4479 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4480 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4481 functions are of good quality).
4482
4483 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4484 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4485 algorithms to break.
4486
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004487- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4488 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4489 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4490 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4491 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4492 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4493 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4494 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4495 order.
4496
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004497- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4498 operation along the most common code paths.
4499
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004500- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4501 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4502
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004503- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4504 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4505 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4506 {}.update(UserDict())
4507
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004508- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4509 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4510 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4511 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4512 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4513 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4514 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4515 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4516
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004517- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004518 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004519
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004520 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004521 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4522 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004523 join() method of strings
4524 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004525 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4526 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004527 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004528 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004529
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004530- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4531 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4532
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004533- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4534 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4535
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004536- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4537 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4538 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4539 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4540
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004541- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4542 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004543 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004544 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4545 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004546
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004547- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4548
4549
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004550Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004551-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004552
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004553- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004554 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004555 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4556 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4557
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004558- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4559 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4560
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004561- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4562 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4563 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4564 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4565
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004566- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4567 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4568 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4569
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004570- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4571
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004572- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4573
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004574- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4575 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4576 that are still imported into string.py).
4577
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004578- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4579
4580- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4581 Now it does.
4582
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004583- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4584
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004585- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4586 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4587 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4588 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4589 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004590 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4591 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004592
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004593- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4594 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4595 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4596 'help(object)'.
4597
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004598Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004599-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004600
4601- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004602 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004603 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4604 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4605
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004606- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004607 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4608 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004609
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004610C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004611-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004612
4613- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4614 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004615
4616----
4617
4618**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**