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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.)
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Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +000015- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
16 a new .pyc magic.
17
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +000018- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
19 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
20 be there.
21
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +000022- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
23 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
24 the LC_NUMERIC category.
25
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +000026- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
27 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
28 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
29
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +000030- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
31
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +000032- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
33 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
34 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +000035
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +000036- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
37 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
38
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +000039- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
40
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +000041- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
42 new documentation and modified profiler and bdb modules for more details
43
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +000044- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
45
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +000046- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
47
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +000048- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
49 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
50
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +000051- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
52 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
53 Fixes bug #858016 .
54
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +000055- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
56 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
57 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
58
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +000059- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
60 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
61 improves their performance (about 35%).
62
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +000063- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
64 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
65 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
66
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +000067- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
68 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
69 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
70 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
71
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000072- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
73 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
74 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
75 length is not known).
76
77- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
78 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +000079 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
80 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +000081 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
82
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +000083- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
84 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
85
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +000086- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
87 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
88 keyword arguments.
89
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +000090- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
91 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
92 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
93
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000094- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
95 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
96 cases.
97
98- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
99 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
100 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
101 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
102 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
103 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
104 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
105 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
106 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
107 a release build.
108
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000109- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
110 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
111
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000112- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000113 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000114
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000115- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
116 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
117 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
118 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
119 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
120 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
121 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
122 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
123 destroyed.
124
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000125- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
126 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
127 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
128 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
129 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
130 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
131 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
132 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
133
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000134- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
135 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
136 character other than a space.
137
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000138- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
139 by the function object or by the method object, the function
140 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
141 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
142 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
143 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
144 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
145 attributes with the same name.
146
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000147- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
148 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
149 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
150 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
151 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
152 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
153 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
154 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
155 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
156 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
157 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
158 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
159 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
160 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000161
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000162- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
163 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
164 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
165 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
166 This has been repaired.
167
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000168- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
169
170- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
171
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000172- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
173 over a sequence.
174
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000175- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000176 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000177
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000178- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
179
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000180- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
181 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
182 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
183 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
184 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
185 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
186 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
187 records with equal keys is unchanged).
188
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000189- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
190 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
191 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
192
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000193- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
194 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
195 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
196 freelist.
197
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000198- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
199 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
200
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000201- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
202 number.
203
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000204- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
205 a TypeError exception.
206
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000207- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
208 820195.
209
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000210- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
211 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
212 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
213
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000214- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
215 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
216 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000217
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000218- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
219 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
220 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
221
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000222- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
223 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000224 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000225
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000226- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000227 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
228 the first call.
229
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000230
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000231Extension modules
232-----------------
233
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000234- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
235 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
236
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000237- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
238 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
239 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
240 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
241 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
242 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
243 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000244
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000245- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
246
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000247- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
248
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000249- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
250 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
251
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000252- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
253 fewer false positives.
254
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000255- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
256 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
257
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000258- Bug #920575: A problem that _locale module segfaults on
259 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
260
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000261- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
262 scheme has been updated the same as for list objects. The improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000263 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
264 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
265 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000266
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000267- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
268 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
269 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
270 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
271
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000272- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
273 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
274 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
275 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
276 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
277 #897625.
278
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000279- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
280 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
281
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000282- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
283 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
284 and pops on either side of the deque.
285
286- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
287 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
288
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000289- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
290 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
291 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
292 other functions that expect a function argument.
293
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000294- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
295
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000296- os.getsid was added.
297
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000298- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
299 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
300 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
301
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000302- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
303
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000304- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
305
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000306- readline.clear_history was added.
307
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000308- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
309
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000310- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
311
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000312- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
313
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000314- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
315
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000316- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
317
318- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
319
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000320- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
321
322- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
323
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000324- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
325 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
326 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
327
328- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
329 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
330 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
331 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
332 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
333 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
334 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
335
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000336- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
337 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
338 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
339 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000340
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000341- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
342 iterators from a single iterable.
343
344- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
345 of raising a TypeError exception.
346
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000347- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
348 as parameter.
349
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000350Library
351-------
352
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000353- Added Decimal.py per PEP 327.
354
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000355- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
356 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000357
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000358- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
359 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
360
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000361- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
362
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000363- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000364 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000365
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000366- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
367 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
368
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000369- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
370
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000371- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
372 on cygwin and mingw32.
373
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000374- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
375
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000376- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
377 module.
378
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000379- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
380 installation scheme for all platforms.
381
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000382- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000383 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000384
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000385- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
386 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
387 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
388
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000389- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
390 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
391 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
392
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000393- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
394
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000395- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
396
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000397- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
398 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
399
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000400- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
401 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
402 type pattern with the same value exists.
403
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000404- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
405 when run from the command prompt).
406
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000407- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
408 not taken into consideration when caching value.
409
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000410- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
411 default sort).
412
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000413- Added global runctx function to profile module
414
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000415- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
416
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000417- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
418
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000419- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
420
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000421- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
422 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
423 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
424 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
425 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
426 accordingly.
427
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000428- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
429 decoding standards.
430
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000431- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
432 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
433 called for all requests.
434
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000435- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
436 they are passed to the compiler.
437
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000438- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
439 indent, width and depth.
440
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000441- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
442 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
443
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000444- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
445 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
446
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000447- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
448
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000449- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
450
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000451- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
452
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000453- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
454 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
455
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000456- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000457 for better performance.
458
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000459- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000460
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000461- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
462 a string).
463
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000464- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
465
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000466- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
467
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000468- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
469
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000470- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
471
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000472- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
473 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
474 list of fieldnames.
475
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000476- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
477 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
478
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000479- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
480
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000481- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
482 empty lists.
483
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000484- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
485 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
486 and shelves.
487
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000488- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
489 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
490
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000491- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000492 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
493 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000494
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000495- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
496 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000497 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000498
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000499- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000500 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
501 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
502
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000503- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
504 and removed in Py2.4.
505
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000506- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
507
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000508- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
509
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000510Tools/Demos
511-----------
512
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000513- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
514 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
515
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000516- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
517
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000518- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
519 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
520 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
521 destination in situations where both files are given.
522
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000523- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
524 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
525 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
526 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
527
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000528- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
529
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000530- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
531 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
532 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
533 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
534 now.
535
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000536- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
537 in effect
538
539- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
540 C-c C-h
541
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000542- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
543 -d option was given.
544
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000545Build
546-----
547
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000548- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
549 build under OS X.
550
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000551- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
552 --enable-profiling.
553
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000554- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
555 is configured --with-tsc.
556
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000557- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
558 on AMD64.
559
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000560- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
561 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
562
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000563- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
564 removed.
565
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000566- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
567 supported (see PEP 11).
568
569- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
570
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000571- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
572
573- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
574 (see PEP 11).
575
576- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
577 sizeof(char) must be 1.
578
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000579C API
580-----
581
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000582- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
583 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
584 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
585
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000586- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
587 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
588 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
589 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
590
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000591- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
592 generator objects.
593
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000594- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
595 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000596 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
597 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000598
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000599- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
600 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
601
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000602- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
603 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
604 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
605 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
606 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
607
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000608- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
609 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
610 about 10% faster.
611
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000612- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
613 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
614
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000615- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
616 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
617 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
618 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
619
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000620New platforms
621-------------
622
623Tests
624-----
625
626Windows
627-------
628
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000629- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
630 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
631 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
632 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
633
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000634- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
635 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
636 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
637
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000638Mac
639----
640
641
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000642What's New in Python 2.3 final?
643===============================
644
645*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
646
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000647IDLE
648----
649
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000650- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
651 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
652 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
653 context-menu actions.
654
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000655- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
656 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
657 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
658 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
659 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
660 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
661 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
662 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
663 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
664
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000665
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000666What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
667=============================================
668
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000669*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000670
671Core and builtins
672-----------------
673
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000674- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000675 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000676 comment at the end are still unsupported.
677
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000678Extension modules
679-----------------
680
681- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
682 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
683 than once. This has been fixed.
684
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000685- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
686 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
687 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
688 call.
689
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000690- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
691
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000692Library
693-------
694
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000695- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
696 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
697
698- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
699 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
700 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
701 restored.
702
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000703IDLE
704----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000705
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000706- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000707
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000708Build
709-----
710
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000711- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
712 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
713
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000714C API
715-----
716
717Windows
718-------
719
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000720- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
721 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
722
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000723- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
724
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000725Mac
726---
727
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000728- Various fixes to pimp.
729
730- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
731
732- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
733 more problems than it solves.
734
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000735
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000736What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
737=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000738
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000739*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
740
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000741Core and builtins
742-----------------
743
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000744- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
745 by sys.setcheckinterval().
746
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000747- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
748 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000749 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000750
751- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
752 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
753 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000754 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000755
756- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
757 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000758
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000759- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
760 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
761 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
762
763- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000764 770247.
765
766- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000767
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000768Extension modules
769-----------------
770
771- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
772 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
773
774- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
775
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000776- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
777
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000778- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
779 contained within the _strptime module.
780
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000781- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
782 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
783
784- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000785 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
786
787- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
788 the find_class attribute, if present.
789
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000790- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000791
792 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
793 (SF bug 763298).
794
795 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000796 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
797 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
798 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000799
800 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
801
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000802Library
803-------
804
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000805- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
806
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000807- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
808 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
809 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
810 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
811 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
812 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
813 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
814 or Tester().
815
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000816- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
817 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
818 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
819 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
820 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
821 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
822 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
823 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
824 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000825
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000826 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000827
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000828- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
829 weren't before was an oversight.
830
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000831- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
832 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
833
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000834- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
835 when there are no lines.
836
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000837- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
838 which could occur with Tk 8.4
839
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000840- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
841 to child processes.
842
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000843- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
844
845- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
846
847- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
848 xmlrpclib.
849
850- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
851 responses.
852
853- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
854 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
855
856- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
857 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
858 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
859
860- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
861 used as patterns.
862
863- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
864 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
865 than Tk 8.3.
866
867- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
868
869- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000870
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000871Tools/Demos
872-----------
873
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000874- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
875
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000876- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
877
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000878- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000879
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000880Build
881-----
882
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000883- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
884
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000885- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
886
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000887- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
888 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000889
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000890- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
891 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
892 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000893
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000894C API
895-----
896
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000897- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
898 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
899
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000900Windows
901-------
902
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000903- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
904 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
905 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
906 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
907 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
908 Python exception ::
909
910 thread.error: can't start new thread
911
912 is raised now.
913
914- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
915 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
916 instead of from DLL teardown.
917
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000918Mac
919---
920
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000921- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000922 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000923 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
924 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
925 the executable in the bundle.
926
927- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000928
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000929- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
930
931- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
932 on Panther.
933
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000934What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
935================================
936
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000937*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000938
939Core and builtins
940-----------------
941
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000942- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
943 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
944 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
945 with the -i option.
946
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000947- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
948 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
949
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000950- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
951 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
952
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000953- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
954 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
955 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
956 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
957 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
958 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
959 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
960 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
961 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
962 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
963 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
964 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
965 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000966
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000967- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
968 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
969 embedded in a lambda expression.
970
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000971- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
972 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
973 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
974 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
975 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
976
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000977- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
978 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
979 matches the restriction on classic classes.
980
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000981- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
982 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
983
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000984- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
985 It's writable again.
986
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000987- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
988 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
989 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000990 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000991
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000992- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
993 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
994 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
995
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000996Extension modules
997-----------------
998
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000999- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1000 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1001
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001002- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1003 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1004 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1005 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1006
1007- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1008 collection.
1009
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001010- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1011 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1012 unique within a single program run.
1013
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001014- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1015 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1016
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001017- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1018 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1019
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001020- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1021 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001022
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001023- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1024
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001025- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1026 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1027
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001028- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1029 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1030 for many BSD-derived systems.
1031
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001032
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001033Library
1034-------
1035
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001036- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1037 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1038 primary ones:
1039
1040 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1041 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1042 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1043
1044 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1045 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1046 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1047 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1048 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1049 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1050
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001051- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1052 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1053 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1054 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1055 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1056 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1057 argument.
1058
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001059- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1060 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1061 in the archive.
1062
1063- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1064 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1065
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001066- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1067 569574).
1068
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001069- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1070 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1071 no more.
1072
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001073- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1074 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1075 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1076 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1077 code coverage.
1078
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001079- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1080 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1081 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001082 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1083 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001084
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001085- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1086 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1087 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001088 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001089
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001090- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1091
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001092- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1093 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1094 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1095 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1096
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001097- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1098 handling.
1099
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001100- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1101 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1102
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001103- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1104 in socket.py.
1105
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001106- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1107
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001108- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1109 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1110 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1111 opener with proxy support.
1112
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001113- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1114
1115- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1116
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001117Tools/Demos
1118-----------
1119
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001120- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1121
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001122- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1123
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001124- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1125 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001126
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001127- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1128 files.
1129
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001130Build
1131-----
1132
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001133- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001134 different root directory.
1135
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001136C API
1137-----
1138
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001139- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1140 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1141 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1142 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1143 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1144 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1145 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1146 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1147 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1148 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1149
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001150- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1151 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1152 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1153 from Python.
1154
1155
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001156New platforms
1157-------------
1158
1159None this time.
1160
1161Tests
1162-----
1163
1164- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1165 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1166
1167Windows
1168-------
1169
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001170- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1171
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001172- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1173 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1174 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1175 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1176 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1177 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1178 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1179 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1180 that's what it's for.
1181
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001182Mac
1183---
1184
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001185- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1186 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1187 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1188 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001189- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1190 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1191- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001192
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001193SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1194------------------------------------
1195
1196430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1197598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1198622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1199661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1200683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1201697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1202713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1203724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1204727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1205729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1206730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1207731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1208732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1209733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1210735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1211740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1212744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1213745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1214747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1215749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1216751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1217753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1218755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1219757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1220760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1221
1222
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001223What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1224================================
1225
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001226*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001227
1228Core and builtins
1229-----------------
1230
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001231- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1232 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1233
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001234- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1235 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1236 and cannot be strings).
1237
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001238- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1239 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1240 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1241 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1242
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001243- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1244 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1245 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1246 Python itself.
1247
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001248- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1249 the referenced object, if it has one.
1250
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001251- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1252 the thread started at
1253 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1254
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001255- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1256 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1257 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1258 placed on a list index.
1259
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001260- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1261 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1262 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1263 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1264
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001265- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1266 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1267 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1268 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1269 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1270 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1271 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1272
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001273- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1274 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1275 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1276 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1277 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1278
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001279- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1280 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001281
1282- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1283 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1284 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1285 #693195.)
1286
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001287- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1288 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001289
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001290- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001291 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001292 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1293 interpreter executions, would fail.
1294
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001295- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001296 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001297 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001298
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001299Extension modules
1300-----------------
1301
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001302- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1303 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1304 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1305 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1306
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001307- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1308 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1309
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001310- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1311 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1312 and Greg Chapman.)
1313
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001314- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1315 recursively.
1316
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001317- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001318 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1319 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1320 leaks.
1321
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001322- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1323
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001324- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1325 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1326 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1327 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1328 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1329 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1330 #705836.
1331
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001332- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001333 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1334
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001335- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1336 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1337 See SF bug #692416.
1338
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001339- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1340 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1341
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001342- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1343 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1344 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001345
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001346- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001347 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1348 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1349
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001350- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1351 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1352 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1353 timeouts to work properly.
1354
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001355Library
1356-------
1357
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001358- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1359 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1360 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1361 future release.
1362
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001363- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1364 for querying platform dependent features.
1365
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001366- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001367
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001368- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1369 pickle protocol versions.
1370
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001371- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1372 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1373 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1374
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001375- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1376
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001377- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1378 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1379 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1380 modules.
1381
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001382- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1383 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1384 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1385
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001386- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1387 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1388
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001389- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1390 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1391 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1392
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001393- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001394 MS Office extensions.
1395
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001396- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1397 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1398
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001399- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1400 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1401
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001402- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1403 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1404 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1405 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1406 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1407 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1408
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001409- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1410 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1411 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001412
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001413- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1414 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1415 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1416
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001417- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1418
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001419- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1420 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1421 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1422
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001423Tools/Demos
1424-----------
1425
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001426- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1427 See the module docstring for details.
1428
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001429Build
1430-----
1431
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001432- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1433 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001434
1435C API
1436-----
1437
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001438- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1439
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001440- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1441 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1442 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1443
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001444- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1445 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001446
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001447 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1448 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1449 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001450
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001451- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001452 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1453
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001454- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1455 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1456 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001457
1458New platforms
1459-------------
1460
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001461None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001462
1463Tests
1464-----
1465
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001466- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1467 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001468
1469Windows
1470-------
1471
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001472- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1473 function.
1474
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001475- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1476 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001477
1478Mac
1479---
1480
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001481- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1482 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001483
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001484- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1485 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001486
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001487- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1488 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1489 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001490
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001491- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001492 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1493 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001494
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001495- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1496 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001497
1498
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001499What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1500=================================
1501
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001502*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001503
1504Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001505-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001506
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001507- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1508 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1509 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1510
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001511- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1512 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1513 (SF patch #664376.)
1514
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001515- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1516 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1517 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1518 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1519 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1520 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001521 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001522
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001523- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1524 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1525 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1526 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001527 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001528
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001529- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1530 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1531 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1532 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1533 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1534 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1535 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1536 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1537 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1538 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1539 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1540
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001541- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1542 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1543 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1544 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1545 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1546 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1547
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001548- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1549 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1550
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001551- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1552 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1553 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1554 case.)
1555
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001556- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1557 passed as unicode strings.
1558
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001559- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1560 See SF bug #683467.
1561
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001562- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1563 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1564
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001565- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1566
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001567- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1568
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001569- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1570 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1571 arguments.
1572
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001573- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1574 See SF bug #667147.
1575
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001576- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001577 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001578 See SF bug #676155.
1579
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001580- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001581 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001582 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1583 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1584 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1585 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1586 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1587 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001588
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001589Extension modules
1590-----------------
1591
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001592- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1593 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1594 tp_as_number pointer.
1595
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001596- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1597 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1598 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1599 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1600 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1601
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001602- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1603
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001604- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1605
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001606- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001607 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001608 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1609 patch #678531.)
1610
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001611- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1612 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1613
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001614- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1615 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1616
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001617- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1618
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001619- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1620 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1621 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1622
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001623- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1624
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001625- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1626 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1627
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001628- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001629
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001630- datetime changes:
1631
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001632 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1633
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001634 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1635 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1636 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1637 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1638 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1639 now.
1640
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001641 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001642 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1643 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001644
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001645 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001646 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001647 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1648 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1649 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1650 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001651
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001652 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1653 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1654 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001655 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1656
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001657 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1658 by a later example coded by Guido.
1659
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001660 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001661 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1662 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1663 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001664 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1665 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1666
1667 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1668 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1669 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1670 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1671 tzinfo subclass instance.
1672
1673 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1674 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1675 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1676 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1677 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1678 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1679 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1680 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001681
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001682 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1683 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1684 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1685 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1686 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001687 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1688
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001689 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001690
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001691 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1692 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1693 as a naive datetime object.
1694
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001695 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1696 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1697 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1698
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001699 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1700 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1701 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1702 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1703 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1704 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1705 comparison.
1706
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001707 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1708 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1709 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1710 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001711 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001712
1713 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001714
1715 and ::
1716
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001717 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1718
1719 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1720 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1721 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1722 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1723
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001724 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1725 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1726 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1727 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1728 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1729
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001730 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1731 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001732 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1733 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001734
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001735Library
1736-------
1737
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001738- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1739 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1740
1741- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1742 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1743 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1744 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1745 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1746 See PEP 307 for details.
1747
1748- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1749 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1750
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001751- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1752 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001753 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001754 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1755 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001756 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001757
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001758- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1759 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1760
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001761- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1762 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1763 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1764
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001765- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1766
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001767- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1768 exception.
1769
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001770- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1771 class.
1772
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001773- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1774 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1775 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1776
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001777- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1778 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1779
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001780- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001781 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1782 See SF bug #659228.
1783
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001784- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1785 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1786 See SF patch #651082.
1787
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001788- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001789
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001790- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1791 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1792
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001793- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001794 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001795
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001796- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1797 DOS paths from other platforms.
1798
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001799Tools/Demos
1800-----------
1801
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001802- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1803 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1804 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1805 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1806 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1807 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1808 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1809 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1810 example:
1811
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001812 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1813 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001814
1815 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1816
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001817
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001818Build
1819-----
1820
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001821- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1822 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1823 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001824 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1825
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001826 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1827
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001828- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1829 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1830 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1831 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1832 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1833 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1834 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1835 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1836 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1837
1838- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1839 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1840 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1841 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1842
1843- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1844 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1845
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001846C API
1847-----
1848
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001849- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1850 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001851
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001852- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1853 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1854 tp_as_number pointer.
1855
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001856- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1857 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1858 (SF #681367)
1859
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001860- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1861 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1862 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1863 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001864
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001865Tests
1866-----
1867
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001868- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001869 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1870 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1871 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1872 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1873 pydoc.)
1874
1875- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1876
1877- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001878
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001879Windows
1880-------
1881
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001882- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1883 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1884 time).
1885
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001886- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1887 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1888
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001889- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1890 release without strong cryptography.
1891
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001892- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001893 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001894
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001895- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1896 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1897
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001898Mac
1899---
1900
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001901- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1902 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001903
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001904- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1905 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1906 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001907
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001908- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1909 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001910
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001911- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1912 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1913 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1914 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001915
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001916- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001917 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1918 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1919 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001920
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001921
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001922What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001923=================================
1924
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001925*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001926
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001927Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001928--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001929
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001930- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1931
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001932- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1933 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001934 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001935 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001936 a different meaning than before.
1937
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001938- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001939 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001940 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001941
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001942- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001943 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001944 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001945
1946- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1947 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1948 and deallocation.
1949
1950- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1951 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1952
1953- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1954 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1955 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1956 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1957 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1958
1959- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1960 now detected by the garbage collector.
1961
1962- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1963 [SF bug 519621]
1964
1965- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1966 identifier.
1967
1968- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1969 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1970 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1971 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1972 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1973 [SF bug 563060]
1974
1975- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1976 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1977 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1978 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1979 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1980
1981- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1982 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1983 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1984
1985- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1986
1987- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1988 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1989 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1990 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1991 state of the slots would be lost.)
1992
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001993Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001994-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001995
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001996- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001997 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1998 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1999 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2000 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002001 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2002 Jython 2.1.
2003
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002004- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002005 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002006 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2007 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2008 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2009 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2010 these, see PEP 302.
2011
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002012- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2013 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2014 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2015
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002016- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2017 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2018 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2019
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002020- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2021 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2022 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2023
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002024- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2025 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2026 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2027 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2028 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2029 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2030 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2031 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2032 releases or implementations.
2033
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002034- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002035 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2036 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002037
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002038- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2039 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2040
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002041- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2042 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2043 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2044
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002045- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2046 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2047
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002048- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2049 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002050 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2051 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002052
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002053- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2054 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2055 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2056 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2057 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2058
2059 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2060 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2061 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2062 pattern.
2063
2064 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2065 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2066 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2067 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2068
2069 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2070 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2071 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2072 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2073 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2074 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2075
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002076- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2077 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2078 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2079 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2080 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2081 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2082 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2083 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002084
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002085- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2086 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2087 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2088 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2089 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002090 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2091 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2092 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2093 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2094 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2095 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2096 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002097
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002098- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2099 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2100
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002101- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2102 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2103 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2104 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2105 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2106 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2107 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2108 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2109 to Zack Weinberg!
2110
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002111- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2112 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2113 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2114 type. This has been fixed now.
2115
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002116- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2117 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2118 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2119
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002120- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2121 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2122 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2123 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2124 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2125 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2126 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2127 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002128 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002129
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002130- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2131 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2132 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002133
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002134- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2135 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2136 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2137 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2138 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2139 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2140 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2141 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002142 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002143 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2144 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2145
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002146- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2147 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2148 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2149 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2150 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2151 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2152 this.)
2153
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002154- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2155 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002156 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002157 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002158 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2159 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002160 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2161 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002162
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002163- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2164 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2165 currently running.
2166
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002167- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2168 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2169 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2170 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2171
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002172- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2173 as directory names.
2174
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002175- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2176 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2177
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002178- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2179 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2180
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002181- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002182 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2183 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002184
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002185- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2186 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2187 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2188 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2189 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2190
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002191- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2192 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2193 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2194 removed.
2195
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002196- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2197 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2198 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2199
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002200- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2201 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2202 to __debug__.
2203
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002204- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2205 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2206 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2207
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002208- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2209 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2210 deprecated now.
2211
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002212- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2213 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2214 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002215
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002216- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2217 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2218 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2219 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2220 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002221
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002222- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2223 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2224
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002225- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2226 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2227 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002228 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002229 is backward compatible.
2230
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002231- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2232 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2233 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2234 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2235 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2236
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002237- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2238 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2239 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2240 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2241 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2242 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002243
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002244- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2245 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2246
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002247- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2248 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2249
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002250- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2251 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2252 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2253 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2254 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2255
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002256- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2257 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2258 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2259
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002260- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002261 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2262
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002263- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2264 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2265 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002266
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002267- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2268 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2269
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002270- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2271 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2272 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2273
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002274- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2275
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002276Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002277-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002278
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002279- Added three operators to the operator module:
2280 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2281 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2282 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2283
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002284- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2285
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002286- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2287 archives.
2288
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002289- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2290 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2291 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2292
2293 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2294
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002295- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2296 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2297 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002298 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002299
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002300- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2301 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2302 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2303 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002304 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2305 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2306 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2307 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002308
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002309- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2310 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002311
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002312- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2313
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002314- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2315 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2316
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002317- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2318 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2319 supported.
2320
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002321- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2322
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002323- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2324 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002325
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002326- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2327 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2328
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002329- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2330
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002331- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2332 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2333
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002334- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2335 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2336 functions but callable type objects.
2337
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002338- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002339 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002340 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002341
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002342- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2343 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002344
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002345- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2346 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002347
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002348- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2349 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2350 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2351 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2352
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002353- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2354 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002355
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002356- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2357 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2358 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2359 and __imul__.
2360
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002361- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002362 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2363 is called.
2364
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002365- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2366 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2367 interpreter was compiled.
2368
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002369- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2370 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2371 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002372 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002373 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2374 1, not 2.
2375
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002376- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2377 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2378 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2379 limit.
2380
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002381- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2382 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2383 bug #623464.
2384
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002385- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2386 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2387 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2388 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2389
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002390Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002391-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002392
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002393- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2394
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002395- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2396 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2397 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2398 with Python 2.3a2.
2399
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002400- os.path exposes getctime.
2401
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002402- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002403 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002404 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002405 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002406 unit tests of floating point results.
2407
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002408- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2409 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2410 has been increased.
2411
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002412- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2413 executed.
2414
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002415- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2416 postinstallation script.
2417
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002418- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2419 test the current module.
2420
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002421- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002422 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2423 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2424 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2425 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2426
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002427- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002428 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002429 Ward's Optik package.
2430
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002431- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2432 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2433 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2434 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2435
2436- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2437 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002438 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002439
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002440- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2441 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2442 shelf are binary pickles.
2443
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002444- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2445 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2446
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002447- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2448 modules are iterators now.
2449
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002450- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2451 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2452 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2453 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2454 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2455 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002456
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002457- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2458 with their entity value.
2459
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002460- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2461
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002462- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2463 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002464
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002465- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2466 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002467 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002468
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002469- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2470 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2471 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2472 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2473 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2474 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2475 main():
2476
2477 import locale
2478 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2479
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002480- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2481 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2482
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002483- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2484 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2485 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2486 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2487 to the new standard.
2488
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002489- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2490 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2491 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2492 an extension to the database.
2493
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002494- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2495 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2496 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2497 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002498 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002499
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002500- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002501 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002502
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002503- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2504 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2505 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2506 bounded integers.
2507
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002508- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2509 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2510 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2511 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2512 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2513 in existence.
2514
2515 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2516 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2517 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2518 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2519 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2520 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2521
2522 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2523 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2524 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2525 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2526
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002527- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2528 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2529 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2530
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002531- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2532
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002533- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2534 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2535 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2536 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2537
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002538- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2539 argument.
2540
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002541- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2542 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2543 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2544 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2545 [SF patch 560794].
2546
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002547- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2548 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2549 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002550 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2551 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2552 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002553
2554- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2555 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002556
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002557- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2558 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2559 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2560 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002561
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002562- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2563 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2564 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2565 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2566 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2567
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002568- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002569
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002570- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2571
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002572- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2573 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2574 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2575 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2576 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2577 identical to None.
2578
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002579- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2580 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2581 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2582 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2583 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2584 results now.
2585
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002586- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2587 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2588
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002589- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2590 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2591 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2592 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2593 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2594 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2595 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2596 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2597
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002598- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2599
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002600- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2601 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2602
2603- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2604 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2605 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2606 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2607 and other systems.
2608
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002609- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2610 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2611 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2612 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 +00002613 work well with these.
2614
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002615- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2616
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002617- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002618 connections.
2619
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002620- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2621 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2622 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2623
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002624- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2625 sets
2626
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002627- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2628 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2629 name.
2630
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002631- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2632 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2633 passed in.
2634
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002635- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002636 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002637 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2638 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002639
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002640- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2641
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002642- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2643
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002644- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2645 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2646 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2647
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002648- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2649 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2650 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2651 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002652 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002653
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002654- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002655 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002656 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002657
2658- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2659 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2660 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2661
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002662- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002663 the value of its expression argument.
2664
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002665- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2666 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2667 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2668
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002669- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2670 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2671 skipstone browser was included.
2672
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002673- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2674 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2675
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002676Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002677-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002678
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002679- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2680 names in addition to accepting file names.
2681
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002682- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2683 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2684 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2685 still used and useful.)
2686
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002687- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2688 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2689 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2690 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002691
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002692- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2693 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2694 the generated binary.
2695
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002696Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002697-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002698
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002699- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2700
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002701- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2702 except in the hands of experts.
2703
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002704- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002705 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2706 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2707 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002708
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002709- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2710 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2711 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2712 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2713 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2714 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2715 builds.
2716
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002717- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2718 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2719 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2720 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2721 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2722 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2723 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2724 new type.
2725
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002726- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002727
2728 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2729 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2730 positive infinities.
2731
2732 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2733 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2734 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2735 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2736 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2737 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2738 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2739
2740 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2741
2742 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2743
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002744- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2745 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2746 size of the executable.
2747
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002748- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2749 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2750 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2751 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002752
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002753- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2754
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002755- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2756 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2757 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002758
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002759- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2760 well as Unix.
2761
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002762- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2763 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2764 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2765 modules in the README file for details.
2766
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002767C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002768-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002769
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002770- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2771 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002772 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002773 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002774 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002775
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002776- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2777 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2778 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2779 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2780 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2781 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002782 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002783 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2784 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2785 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2786 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2787 aligned.)
2788
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002789- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2790 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2791 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2792
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002793- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2794 level.
2795
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002796- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2797 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2798 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2799 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2800 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2801
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002802- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2803 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2804 code.
2805
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002806- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2807 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2808 adjusting for negative indices.
2809
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002810- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2811 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2812 object.
2813
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002814- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2815 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2816 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2817
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002818- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2819 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002820
2821- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2822
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002823- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2824 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2825 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2826 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2827
2828- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2829
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002830- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002831
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002832- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002833 without going through the buffer API.
2834
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002835- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002836
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002837- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2838 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2839 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2840 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2841
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002842- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2843 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2844
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002845- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002846 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2847
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002848New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002849-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002850
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002851- OpenVMS is now supported.
2852
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002853- AtheOS is now supported.
2854
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002855- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2856
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002857- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2858
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002859Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002860-----
2861
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002862- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2863 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2864 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002865
2866Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002867-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002868
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002869- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2870 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2871 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2872 bugs.
2873 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002874 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002875 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2876 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002877 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002878
2879- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002880 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002881
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002882- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2883 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2884
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002885- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2886 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002887 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002888 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2889
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002890- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2891 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2892 use files" uninstall option).
2893
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002894- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2895
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002896- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2897 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2898
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002899- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2900 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2901 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2902
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002903- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2904 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2905 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2906 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2907 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002908 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2909 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2910 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002911
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002912- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002913 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002914 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2915 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2916 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2917 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2918 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2919 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2920 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2921 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2922 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2923 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2924 work around.
2925
2926- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2927 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2928 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2929 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2930 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2931 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2932 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2933 specified with O_CREAT too).
2934
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002935Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002936----
2937
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002938- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002939
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002940- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2941 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2942 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2943
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002944- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2945 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2946 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2947
2948- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2949 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2950 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2951 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2952 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2953 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2954 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2955 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002956
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002957- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2958 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2959 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002960
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002961- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2962 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2963 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2964 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2965 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002966
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002967- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2968 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2969 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002970
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002971- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2972 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002973
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002974- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2975 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2976 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2977 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2978 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002979
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002980- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2981 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2982 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2983
2984- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2985 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2986 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002987
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002988- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2989 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2990 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2991 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002992 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002993
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002994- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2995 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002996
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002997- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2998 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002999
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003000- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003001 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003002 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3003 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003004
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003005
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003006What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003007===============================
3008
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003009*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3010
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003011Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003012--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003013
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003014- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3015 with a custom metaclass.
3016
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003017Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003018-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003019
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003020- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3021 are proxies.
3022
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003023Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003024-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003025
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003026- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3027 very short strings.
3028
3029- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3030 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3031 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3032 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3033 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3034
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003035Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003036-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003037
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003038- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3039 close or delete time).
3040
3041- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3042 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3043
3044- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3045
3046- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003047 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003048
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003049Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003050-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003051
3052Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003053-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003054
3055C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003056-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003057
3058New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003059-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003060
3061Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003062-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003063
3064Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003065-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003066
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003067- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3068
3069- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3070 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3071
3072- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3073 deleted at process exit time.
3074
3075- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3076 in backslash.
3077
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003078Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003079----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003080
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003081- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3082 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3083 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3084
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003085
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003086What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003087===========================
3088
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003089*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3090
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003091Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003092--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003093
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003094- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3095 been extensively updated. See
3096
3097 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3098
3099 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3100
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003101- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3102 deleted!
3103
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003104- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3105 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3106 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3107 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3108 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3109
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003110- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3111
3112 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3113 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3114
3115 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3116 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3117 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3118 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3119 supported anyway.
3120
3121 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3122 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3123
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003124- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3125 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3126 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3127 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3128 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003129
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003130- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3131 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3132 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3133
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003134Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003135-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003136
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003137- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3138 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3139 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3140 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3141 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3142 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003143 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3144 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3145 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3146 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003147
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003148- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3149 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3150 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3151
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003152Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003153-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003154
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003155- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3156
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003157Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003158-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003159
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003160- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3161 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3162 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3163 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3164 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3165 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3166
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003167- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3168
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003169- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3170
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003171- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3172
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003173- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3174 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3175 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3176
3177- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3178
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003179Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003180-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003181
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003182- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3183 off a search on Google.
3184
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003185Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003186-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003187
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003188- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3189 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3190 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3191 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3192 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3193 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3194 other platforms should do likewise.
3195
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003196- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3197 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3198 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3199
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003200C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003201-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003202
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003203- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3204 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3205 producing key-value pairs.
3206
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003207- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003208 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003209 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3210 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3211 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3212 previously went unchallenged.
3213
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003214New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003215-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003216
3217Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003218-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003219
3220Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003221-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003222
3223Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003224----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003225
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003226- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3227 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003228
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003229- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3230 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3231 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3232 home.
3233
3234
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003235What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003236===========================
3237
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003238*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3239
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003240Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003241--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003242
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003243- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3244 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003245
3246 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003247 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003248
3249 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3250 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003251 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003252 This needs to be documented.
3253
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003254- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3255 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3256
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003257- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3258 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3259 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3260
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003261- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3262 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3263
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003264- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3265 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3266 class forbids it).
3267
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003268- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3269 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3270 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3271
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003272- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3273
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003274Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003275-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003276
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003277- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3278 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003279 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003280
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003281- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3282 (like 1 + '').
3283
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003284Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003285-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003286
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003287- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3288 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3289 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3290 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003291 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003292 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3293
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003294- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3295 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3296 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3297 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3298
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003299- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3300 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003301 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3302 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3303 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003304
3305- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3306 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003307
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003308- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3309 bytes on its input.
3310
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003311Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003312-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003313
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003314- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003315 convenience function.
3316
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003317- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3318 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3319 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003320 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3321 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3322 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3323 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3324 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3325 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003326
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003327- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3328 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3329 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3330 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3331
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003332- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3333 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3334 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3335
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003336- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3337 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3338 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3339 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3340
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003341- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3342 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003343 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003344 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3345 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3346 new -l and -e options.
3347
3348- statcache is now deprecated.
3349
3350- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3351 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003352 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003353 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3354 time properly taken into account.
3355
3356- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3357 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3358 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3359 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3360
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003361Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003362-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003363
3364Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003365-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003366
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003367- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3368 is built with libdb3 if available.
3369
3370- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3371
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003372C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003373-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003374
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003375- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3376 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3377 PySequence_Size().
3378
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003379- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3380
3381- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3382 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3383 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3384
3385- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3386 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3387
3388- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3389 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3390
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003391New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003392-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003393
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003394- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3395 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3396
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003397- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3398 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3399
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003400- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3401
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003402Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003403-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003404
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003405- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3406 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3407
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003408Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003409-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003410
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003411Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003412----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003413
3414- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3415 removed completely in the next release.
3416
3417- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3418 OSX.
3419
3420- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3421 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3422
3423- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3424
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003425
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003426What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003427===========================
3428
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003429*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3430
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003431Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003432--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003433
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003434- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003435 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003436 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003437 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3438 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003439 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3440 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003441 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3442 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003443
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003444- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3445 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3446
3447- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3448 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3449
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003450Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003451-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003452
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003453- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3454 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3455 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3456 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3457 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3458 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3459 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3460 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3461
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003462- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3463 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3464 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3465 example).
3466
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003467- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003468 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003469 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003470 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003471
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003472- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3473 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3474 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003475 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003476
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003477- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3478 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3479 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3480 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3481 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3482 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3483
3484 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3485
3486 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3487
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003488Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003489-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003490
3491- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3492
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003493- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3494
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003495- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3496 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003497
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003498- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3499 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3500 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3501 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3502 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3503 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003504 attributes.
3505
3506- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3507 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3508 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003509
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003510- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3511 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3512 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003513
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003514- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3515 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3516 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003517 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3518 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3519
3520- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3521 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003522
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003523Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003524-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003525
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003526- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3527 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3528
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003529- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3530 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3531 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3532 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3533
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003534- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3535 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3536 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3537 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3538
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003539 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3540 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3541 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3542 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3543 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3544 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3545 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3546 without losing information).
3547
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003548- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003549 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3550 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3551 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3552 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3553 module).
3554
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003555 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003556 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3557 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3558 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3559 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003560
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003561- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003562 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3563 encoding.
3564
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003565- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3566 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3567
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003568- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003569 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3570
3571- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3572 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3573 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3574 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3575
3576- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3577
3578- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3579 ON, and OFF.
3580
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003581- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3582 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3583
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003584Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003585-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003586
3587- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3588 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3589 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003590
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003591- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3592 been added: -X and -E.
3593
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003594Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003595-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003596
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003597- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3598 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3599
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003600C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003601-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003602
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003603- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3604 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3605 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3606 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3607 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3608
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003609- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3610 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3611 as long) arguments.
3612
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003613- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3614 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3615 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3616 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3617 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3618 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3619
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003620- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3621 input.
3622
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003623New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003624-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003625
3626Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003627-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003628
3629Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003630-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003631
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003632- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3633 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3634 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3635
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003636- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3637 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3638 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003639 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003640
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003641 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3642 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3643 import signal
3644 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003645
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003646 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003647 while 1:
3648 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003649 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003650 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3651 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3652 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3653 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003654
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003655
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003656What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3657===========================
3658
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003659*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3660
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003661Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003662--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003663
3664- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3665 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3666 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3667
3668- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3669 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3670 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3671 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3672 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3673 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3674 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003675
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003676- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003677 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003678 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3679 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3680 associate a docstring with a property.
3681
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003682- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3683 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3684 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3685 other built-in object types.
3686
3687- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3688 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3689 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3690 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3691 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3692
3693- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3694 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3695
3696- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3697 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003698 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003699 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3700 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3701 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3702 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3703 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3704
3705- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3706 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3707 class.
3708
3709- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3710 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3711 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3712 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3713
3714- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3715 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3716 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3717 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3718
3719- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3720 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3721
3722- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3723 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3724 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3725 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3726 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003727 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003728 with the same value as s.
3729
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003730- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3731
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003732Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003733----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003734
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003735- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3736
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003737- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3738 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3739 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3740 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3741 objects.
3742
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003743- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3744 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003745 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3746 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3747
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003748- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3749 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3750 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3751
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003752Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003753-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003754
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003755- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3756 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3757 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3758 by the instances.
3759
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003760- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3761 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3762 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3763
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003764- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3765 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3766 before the entire comparison is complete.
3767
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003768- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3769 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3770 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3771
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003772- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3773 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3774 getwriter().
3775
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003776- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3777 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3778
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003779- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003780 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3781 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3782
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003783- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3784 iterable object.
3785
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003786- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3787 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003788
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003789- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3790 authentication.
3791
3792- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3793 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003794
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003795- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003796 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3797 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3798 a sample driver.)
3799
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003800Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003801-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003802
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003803- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3804 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3805 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3806 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3807 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3808 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3809 kernel has large file support.
3810
3811- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3812 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3813 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3814 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3815 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3816
3817- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3818 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3819 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3820
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003821C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003822-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003823
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003824- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3825 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3826
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003827New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003828-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003829
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003830- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3831 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3832
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003833Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003834-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003835
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003836- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3837 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3838 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3839 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3840 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3841
3842- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3843 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3844 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3845 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3846
3847- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3848 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3849
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003850Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003851-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003852
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003853- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003854 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3855 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003856
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003857
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003858What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3859===========================
3860
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003861*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3862
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003863Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003864----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003865
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003866- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3867 big to represent as a C double.
3868
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003869- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3870 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3871 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3872 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3873 restriction).
3874
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003875- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3876 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3877 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3878 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3879 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3880
3881 >>> dir([])
3882 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3883 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3884 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3885 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3886 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3887 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3888 'reverse', 'sort']
3889
3890 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3891
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003892- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003893 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3894 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3895 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3896 OverflowError exception.
3897
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003898- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003899 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003900 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3901 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3902 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3903 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3904 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003905 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003906 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3907 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3908
3909 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3910 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3911 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3912 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003913
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003914- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003915 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3916 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3917 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3918 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3919 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3920 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3921 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3922 once it is created.
3923
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003924- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3925 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3926 (key, value) pairs.
3927
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003928- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003929 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3930 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3931
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003932- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3933 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3934 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3935 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3936 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003937
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003938- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003939 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3940 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3941
3942 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3943
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003944- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003945 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3946
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003947Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003948-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003949
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003950- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003951 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3952 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003953
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003954- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3955 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3956 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3957 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3958 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3959 in this area anymore).
3960
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003961- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3962 threading.Timer.
3963
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003964- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3965 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3966
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003967- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003968 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3969
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003970- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003971 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3972 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3973 converted to Python longs.
3974
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003975- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003976 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3977
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003978- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3979 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3980 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3981
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003982Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003983-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003984
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003985- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3986 division operators as per PEP 238.
3987
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003988Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003989-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003990
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003991- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3992 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3993 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3994 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3995
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003996C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003997-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003998
3999- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004000
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004001- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4002 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004003 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004004
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004005 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4006 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004007 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004008 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004009
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004010- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004011 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4012 module:
4013
4014 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004015
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004016 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4017 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004018
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004019 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4020 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004021
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004022 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4023
4024 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4025
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004026- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004027 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4028 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4029 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004030
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004031New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004032-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004033
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004034- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4035 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4036 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4037 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4038 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004039
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004040Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004041-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004042
4043Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004044-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004045
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004046- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4047 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4048 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4049 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004050 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4051 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4052 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4053 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4054 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004055
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004056- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004057 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4058
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004059
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004060What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4061===========================
4062
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004063*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4064
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004065Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004066-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004067
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004068- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4069 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4070
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004071- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4072 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4073 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004074
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004075- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4076 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4077 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4078 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004079
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004080- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4081
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004082- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004083
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004084Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004085-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004086
4087- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004088 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004089 the module docstring for details.
4090
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004091Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004092-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004093
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004094- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004095 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4096 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4097 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004098
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004099- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4100 Nick Mathewson.
4101
4102Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004103----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004104
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004105- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4106 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4107 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4108 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4109 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4110 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4111 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4112 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4113
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004114- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4115 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4116 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4117 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4118
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004119- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4120 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4121 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4122 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4123 come a long way).
4124
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004125- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4126 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4127 write filters for these warnings).
4128
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004129- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4130 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4131 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4132 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4133 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4134
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004135- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4136 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4137 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4138 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4139 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4140 older distribution.
4141
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004142Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004143-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004144
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004145- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4146 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004147 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004148
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004149- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4150 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4151 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4152
4153- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4154
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004155- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4156
4157- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4158
4159- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4160
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004162
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004163- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4164
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004165New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004166-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004167
4168C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004169-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004170
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004171- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4172 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4173 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4174 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4175 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4176 against buffer overruns.
4177
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004178- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004179 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4180 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004181 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4182 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4183 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4184
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004185- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4186 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4187 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4188 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4189 deprecated.
4190
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004191Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004192-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004193
4194- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4195 relevant is found.
4196
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004197
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004198What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004199===========================
4200
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004201*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4202
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004203Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004204----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004205
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004206- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4207 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4208 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4209 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4210 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4211 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4212 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4213 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004214 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004215 repaired.
4216
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004217- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004218 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004219 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4220 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4221 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4222 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4223 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4224 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4225 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4226 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4227
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004228- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4229 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4230 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4231 leading BMO character).
4232
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004233- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4234 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4235 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4236
4237 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4238 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4239 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004240
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004241 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4242 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4243 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4244 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4245 for various simple to use conversions.
4246
4247 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4248 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4249
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004250 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4251 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4252 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4253 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4254 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4255 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4256 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4257 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4258 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4259 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4260 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4261 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4262 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4263 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4264 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004265
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004266- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4267 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4268 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004269 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004270 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004271
4272 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004273 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4274 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4275 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4276 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4277 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004278 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4279 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004280
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004281 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4282 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4283 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004284 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004285
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004286- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4287 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4288 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4289 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4290 floating arithmetic,
4291
4292 x = 9007199254740992.0
4293 print long(x)
4294
4295 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4296 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4297 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4298 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4299 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4300 functions are of good quality).
4301
4302 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4303 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4304 algorithms to break.
4305
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004306- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4307 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4308 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4309 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4310 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4311 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4312 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4313 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4314 order.
4315
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004316- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4317 operation along the most common code paths.
4318
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004319- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4320 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4321
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004322- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4323 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4324 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4325 {}.update(UserDict())
4326
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004327- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4328 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4329 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4330 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4331 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4332 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4333 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4334 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4335
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004336- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004337 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004338
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004339 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004340 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4341 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004342 join() method of strings
4343 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004344 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4345 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004346 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004347 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004348
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004349- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4350 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4351
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004352- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4353 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4354
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004355- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4356 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4357 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4358 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4359
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004360- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4361 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004362 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004363 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4364 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004365
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004366- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4367
4368
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004369Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004370-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004371
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004372- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004373 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004374 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4375 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4376
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004377- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4378 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4379
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004380- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4381 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4382 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4383 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4384
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004385- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4386 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4387 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4388
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004389- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4390
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004391- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4392
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004393- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4394 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4395 that are still imported into string.py).
4396
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004397- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4398
4399- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4400 Now it does.
4401
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004402- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4403
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004404- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4405 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4406 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4407 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4408 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004409 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4410 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004411
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004412- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4413 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4414 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4415 'help(object)'.
4416
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004417Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004418-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004419
4420- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004421 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004422 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4423 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4424
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004425- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004426 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4427 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004428
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004429C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004430-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004431
4432- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4433 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004434
4435----
4436
4437**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**