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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +000015- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
16 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
17 @staticmethod
18 def foo(bar):
19 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect this XXX before 2.4a2)
20
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +000021- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
22 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
23 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
24 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
25 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
26 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
27 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
28 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
29 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
30 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
31 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
32
33 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
34 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
35 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
36 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
37 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
38 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
39 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
40
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +000041- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
42 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
43
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000044- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000045 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000046
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000047- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000048 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000049 which was missing for no apparent reason.
50
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000051- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000052 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
53 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
54
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000055- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
56 types that support garbage collection.
57
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000058- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
59
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000060- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
61 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
62 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
63 Jython.
64
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +000065- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
66
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +000067- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
68 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
69
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +000070- unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and the East Asian
71 Width support is moved to unicodedata extension module.
72
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +000073- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
74 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
75 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
76
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000077Extension modules
78-----------------
79
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +000080- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
81
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000082Library
83-------
84
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +000085- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
86
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +000087- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
88 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
89 same as when the argument is omitted).
90 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
91
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +000092- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
93
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +000094- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
95 schemes are offered.
96
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +000097- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
98
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +000099- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
100 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
101 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
102
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000103- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
104
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000105- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
106 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
107
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000108- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
109 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
110 when dummy_threading is being used.
111
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000112- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
113 from a tarfile.
114
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000115- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000116 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000117
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000118- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
119 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
120 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
121 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
122
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000123- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
124 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
125
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000126- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
127 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
128 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
129 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
130 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
131 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
132 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
133 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
134 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
135 by some other method in progress).
136
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000137- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
138 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
139 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000140
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000141- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
142
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000143- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
144 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
145 AM Kuchling.
146
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000147- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
148 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
149 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
150
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000151- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
152 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
153 instead of unsigned.
154
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000155- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000156 no longer part of the public API.
157
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000158- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
159 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
160 string methods of the same name).
161
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000162- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
163 SF patch 982681.
164
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000165- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000166 SF patch 945642.
167
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000168- doctest unittest integration improvements:
169
170 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
171
172 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
173 DocTestSuites.
174
175- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
176 that provide thread-local data.
177
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000178- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
179 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
180
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000181- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
182
183- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
184 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
185 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
186
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000187- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
188
189 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
190 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
191 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000192
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000193 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
194 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
195 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
196 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
197
198 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
199 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
200
201 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
202 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
203 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
204 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
205
206 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
207 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
208 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
209 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
210 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
211
212 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
213 wrapping help output.
214
215 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
216 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
217 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000218
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000219Tools/Demos
220-----------
221
222Build
223-----
224
225C API
226-----
227
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000228- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
229 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
230 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
231 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
232 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
233 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
234 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
235 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
236 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
237 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
238 its visible semantics have not changed.
239
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000240- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
241 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
242
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000243Documentation
244-------------
245
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000246- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000247
248 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
249 assigning thier values
250
251 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
252
253 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
254
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000255- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000256
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000257New platforms
258-------------
259
260Tests
261-----
262
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000263- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000264 platforms that use the Makefile.
265
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000266- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
267 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
268 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
269
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000270Windows
271-------
272
273Mac
274---
275
276
277
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000278What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
279=================================
280
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000281*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000282
283Core and builtins
284-----------------
285
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000286- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
287 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
288 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
289 objects now (one object instead of three).
290
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000291- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
292 Windows DLLs.
293
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000294- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
295 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000296
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000297- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
298 a new .pyc magic.
299
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000300- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
301 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
302 be there.
303
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000304- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
305 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
306 the LC_NUMERIC category.
307
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000308- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
309 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
310 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
311
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000312- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
313
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000314- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
315 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
316 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000317
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000318- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
319 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
320
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000321- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
322
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000323- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000324 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000325
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000326- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
327
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000328- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
329
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000330- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
331 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
332
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000333- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
334 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
335 Fixes bug #858016 .
336
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000337- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
338 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
339 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
340
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000341- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
342 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
343 improves their performance (about 35%).
344
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000345- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
346 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
347 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
348
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000349- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
350 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
351 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
352 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
353
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000354- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
355 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
356 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
357 length is not known).
358
359- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
360 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000361 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
362 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000363 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
364
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000365- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
366 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
367
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000368- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
369 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
370 keyword arguments.
371
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000372- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
373 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
374 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
375
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000376- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
377 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
378 cases.
379
380- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
381 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
382 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
383 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
384 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
385 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
386 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
387 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
388 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
389 a release build.
390
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000391- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
392 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
393
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000394- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000395 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000396
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000397- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
398 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
399 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
400 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
401 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
402 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
403 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
404 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
405 destroyed.
406
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000407- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
408 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
409 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
410 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
411 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
412 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
413 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
414 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
415
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000416- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
417 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
418 character other than a space.
419
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000420- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
421 by the function object or by the method object, the function
422 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
423 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
424 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
425 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
426 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
427 attributes with the same name.
428
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000429- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
430 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
431 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
432 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
433 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
434 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
435 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
436 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
437 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
438 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
439 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
440 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
441 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
442 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000443
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000444- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
445 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
446 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
447 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
448 This has been repaired.
449
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000450- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
451
452- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
453
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000454- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
455 over a sequence.
456
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000457- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000458 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000459
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000460- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
461
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000462- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
463 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
464 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
465 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
466 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
467 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
468 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
469 records with equal keys is unchanged).
470
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000471- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
472 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
473 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
474
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000475- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
476 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
477 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
478 freelist.
479
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000480- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
481 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
482
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000483- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
484 number.
485
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000486- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
487 a TypeError exception.
488
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000489- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
490 820195.
491
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000492- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
493 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
494 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
495
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000496- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000497 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
498 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000499
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000500- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
501 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
502 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
503
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000504- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
505 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000506 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000507
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000508- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000509 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
510 the first call.
511
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000512
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000513Extension modules
514-----------------
515
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000516- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
517 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
518
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000519- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
520 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
521 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
522 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
523 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
524 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
525 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000526
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000527- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
528
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000529- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
530
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000531- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
532 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
533
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000534- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
535 fewer false positives.
536
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000537- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
538 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
539
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000540- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000541 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
542
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000543- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000544 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000545 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
546 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
547 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000548
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000549- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
550 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
551 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
552 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
553
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000554- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
555 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
556 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
557 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
558 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
559 #897625.
560
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000561- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
562 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
563
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000564- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
565 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
566 and pops on either side of the deque.
567
568- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
569 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
570
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000571- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
572 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
573 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
574 other functions that expect a function argument.
575
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000576- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
577
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000578- os.getsid was added.
579
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000580- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
581 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
582 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
583
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000584- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
585
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000586- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
587
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000588- readline.clear_history was added.
589
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000590- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
591
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000592- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
593
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000594- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
595
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000596- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
597
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000598- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
599
600- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
601
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000602- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
603
604- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
605
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000606- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
607 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
608 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
609
610- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
611 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
612 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
613 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
614 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
615 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
616 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
617
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000618- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
619 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
620 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
621 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000622
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000623- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000624 iterators from a single iterable.
625
626- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
627 of raising a TypeError exception.
628
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000629- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
630 as parameter.
631
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000632Library
633-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000634
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000635- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
636 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
637 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000638
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000639- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
640 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
641 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000642
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000643- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000644
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000645- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
646 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000647
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000648- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
649 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
650
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000651- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
652
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000653- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000654 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000655
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000656- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
657 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
658
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000659- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
660
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000661- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
662 on cygwin and mingw32.
663
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000664- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
665
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000666- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
667 module.
668
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000669- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
670 installation scheme for all platforms.
671
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000672- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000673 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000674
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000675- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
676 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
677 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
678
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000679- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
680 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
681 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
682
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000683- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
684
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000685- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
686
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000687- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
688 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
689
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000690- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
691 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
692 type pattern with the same value exists.
693
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000694- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
695 when run from the command prompt).
696
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000697- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
698 not taken into consideration when caching value.
699
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000700- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
701 default sort).
702
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000703- Added global runctx function to profile module
704
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000705- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
706
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000707- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
708
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000709- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
710
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000711- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000712 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
713 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
714 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
715 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
716 accordingly.
717
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000718- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
719 decoding standards.
720
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000721- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
722 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
723 called for all requests.
724
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000725- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
726 they are passed to the compiler.
727
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000728- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
729 indent, width and depth.
730
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000731- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
732 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
733
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000734- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
735 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
736
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000737- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
738
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000739- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
740
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000741- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
742
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000743- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
744 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
745
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000746- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000747 for better performance.
748
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000749- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000750
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000751- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
752 a string).
753
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000754- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
755
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000756- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
757
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000758- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
759
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000760- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
761
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000762- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
763 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
764 list of fieldnames.
765
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000766- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
767 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
768
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000769- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
770
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000771- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
772 empty lists.
773
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000774- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
775 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
776 and shelves.
777
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000778- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
779 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
780
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000781- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000782 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
783 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000784
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000785- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
786 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000787 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000788
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000789- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000790 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
791 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
792
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000793- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
794 and removed in Py2.4.
795
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000796- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
797
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000798- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
799
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000800Tools/Demos
801-----------
802
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000803- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
804 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
805
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000806- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
807
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000808- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
809 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
810 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
811 destination in situations where both files are given.
812
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000813- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
814 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
815 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
816 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
817
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000818- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
819
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000820- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
821 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
822 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
823 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
824 now.
825
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000826- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
827 in effect
828
829- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
830 C-c C-h
831
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000832- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
833 -d option was given.
834
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000835Build
836-----
837
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000838- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
839 build under OS X.
840
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000841- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
842 --enable-profiling.
843
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000844- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
845 is configured --with-tsc.
846
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000847- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
848 on AMD64.
849
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000850- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
851 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
852
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000853- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
854 removed.
855
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000856- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
857 supported (see PEP 11).
858
859- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
860
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000861- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
862
863- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
864 (see PEP 11).
865
866- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
867 sizeof(char) must be 1.
868
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000869C API
870-----
871
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000872- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
873 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
874 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
875
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000876- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
877 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
878 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
879 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
880
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000881- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
882 generator objects.
883
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000884- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
885 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000886 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
887 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000888
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000889- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
890 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
891
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000892- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
893 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
894 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
895 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
896 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
897
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000898- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
899 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
900 about 10% faster.
901
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000902- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
903 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
904
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000905- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
906 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
907 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
908 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
909
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000910Windows
911-------
912
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000913- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
914 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
915 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
916 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
917
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000918- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
919 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
920 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
921
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000922
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000923What's New in Python 2.3 final?
924===============================
925
926*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
927
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000928IDLE
929----
930
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000931- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
932 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
933 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
934 context-menu actions.
935
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000936- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
937 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
938 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
939 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
940 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
941 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
942 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
943 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
944 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
945
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000946
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000947What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
948=============================================
949
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000950*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000951
952Core and builtins
953-----------------
954
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000955- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000956 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000957 comment at the end are still unsupported.
958
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000959Extension modules
960-----------------
961
962- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
963 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
964 than once. This has been fixed.
965
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000966- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
967 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
968 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
969 call.
970
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000971- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
972
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000973Library
974-------
975
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000976- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
977 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
978
979- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
980 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
981 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
982 restored.
983
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000984IDLE
985----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000986
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000987- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000988
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000989Build
990-----
991
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000992- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
993 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
994
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000995C API
996-----
997
998Windows
999-------
1000
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001001- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1002 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1003
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001004- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1005
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001006Mac
1007---
1008
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001009- Various fixes to pimp.
1010
1011- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1012
1013- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1014 more problems than it solves.
1015
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001016
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001017What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1018=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001019
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001020*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1021
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001022Core and builtins
1023-----------------
1024
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001025- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1026 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1027
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001028- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1029 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001030 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001031
1032- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1033 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1034 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001035 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001036
1037- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1038 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001039
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001040- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1041 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1042 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1043
1044- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001045 770247.
1046
1047- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001048
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001049Extension modules
1050-----------------
1051
1052- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1053 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1054
1055- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1056
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001057- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1058
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001059- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1060 contained within the _strptime module.
1061
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001062- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1063 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1064
1065- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001066 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1067
1068- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1069 the find_class attribute, if present.
1070
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001071- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001072
1073 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1074 (SF bug 763298).
1075
1076 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001077 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1078 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1079 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001080
1081 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1082
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001083Library
1084-------
1085
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001086- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1087
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001088- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1089 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1090 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1091 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1092 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1093 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1094 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1095 or Tester().
1096
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001097- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1098 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1099 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1100 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1101 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1102 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1103 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1104 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1105 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001106
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001107 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001108
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001109- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1110 weren't before was an oversight.
1111
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001112- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1113 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1114
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001115- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1116 when there are no lines.
1117
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001118- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1119 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1120
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001121- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1122 to child processes.
1123
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001124- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1125
1126- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1127
1128- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1129 xmlrpclib.
1130
1131- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1132 responses.
1133
1134- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1135 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1136
1137- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1138 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1139 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1140
1141- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1142 used as patterns.
1143
1144- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1145 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1146 than Tk 8.3.
1147
1148- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1149
1150- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001151
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001152Tools/Demos
1153-----------
1154
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001155- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1156
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001157- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1158
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001159- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001160
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001161Build
1162-----
1163
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001164- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1165
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001166- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1167
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001168- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1169 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001170
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001171- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1172 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1173 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001174
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001175C API
1176-----
1177
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001178- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1179 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1180
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001181Windows
1182-------
1183
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001184- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1185 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1186 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1187 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1188 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1189 Python exception ::
1190
1191 thread.error: can't start new thread
1192
1193 is raised now.
1194
1195- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1196 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1197 instead of from DLL teardown.
1198
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001199Mac
1200---
1201
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001202- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001203 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001204 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1205 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1206 the executable in the bundle.
1207
1208- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001209
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001210- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1211
1212- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1213 on Panther.
1214
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001215What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1216================================
1217
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001218*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001219
1220Core and builtins
1221-----------------
1222
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001223- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1224 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1225 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1226 with the -i option.
1227
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001228- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1229 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1230
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001231- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1232 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1233
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001234- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1235 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1236 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1237 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1238 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1239 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1240 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1241 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1242 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1243 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1244 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1245 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1246 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001247
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001248- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1249 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1250 embedded in a lambda expression.
1251
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001252- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1253 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1254 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1255 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1256 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1257
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001258- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1259 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1260 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1261
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001262- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1263 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1264
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001265- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1266 It's writable again.
1267
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001268- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1269 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1270 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001271 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001272
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001273- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1274 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1275 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1276
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001277Extension modules
1278-----------------
1279
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001280- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1281 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1282
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001283- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1284 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1285 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1286 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1287
1288- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1289 collection.
1290
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001291- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1292 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1293 unique within a single program run.
1294
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001295- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1296 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1297
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001298- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1299 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1300
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001301- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1302 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001303
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001304- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1305
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001306- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1307 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1308
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001309- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1310 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1311 for many BSD-derived systems.
1312
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001313
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001314Library
1315-------
1316
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001317- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1318 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1319 primary ones:
1320
1321 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1322 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1323 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1324
1325 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1326 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1327 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1328 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1329 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1330 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1331
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001332- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1333 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1334 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1335 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1336 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1337 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1338 argument.
1339
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001340- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1341 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1342 in the archive.
1343
1344- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1345 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1346
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001347- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1348 569574).
1349
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001350- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1351 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1352 no more.
1353
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001354- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1355 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1356 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1357 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1358 code coverage.
1359
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001360- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1361 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1362 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001363 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1364 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001365
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001366- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1367 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1368 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001369 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001370
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001371- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1372
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001373- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1374 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1375 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1376 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1377
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001378- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1379 handling.
1380
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001381- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1382 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1383
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001384- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1385 in socket.py.
1386
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001387- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1388
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001389- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1390 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1391 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1392 opener with proxy support.
1393
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001394- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1395
1396- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1397
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001398Tools/Demos
1399-----------
1400
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001401- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1402
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001403- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1404
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001405- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1406 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001407
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001408- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1409 files.
1410
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001411Build
1412-----
1413
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001414- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001415 different root directory.
1416
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001417C API
1418-----
1419
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001420- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1421 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1422 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1423 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1424 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1425 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1426 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1427 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1428 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1429 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1430
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001431- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1432 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1433 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1434 from Python.
1435
1436
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001437New platforms
1438-------------
1439
1440None this time.
1441
1442Tests
1443-----
1444
1445- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1446 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1447
1448Windows
1449-------
1450
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001451- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1452
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001453- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1454 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1455 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1456 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1457 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1458 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1459 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1460 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1461 that's what it's for.
1462
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001463Mac
1464---
1465
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001466- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1467 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1468 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1469 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001470- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1471 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1472- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001473
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001474SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1475------------------------------------
1476
1477430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1478598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1479622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1480661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1481683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1482697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1483713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1484724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1485727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1486729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1487730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1488731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1489732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1490733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1491735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1492740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1493744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1494745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1495747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1496749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1497751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1498753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1499755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1500757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1501760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1502
1503
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001504What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1505================================
1506
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001507*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001508
1509Core and builtins
1510-----------------
1511
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001512- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1513 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1514
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001515- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1516 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1517 and cannot be strings).
1518
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001519- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1520 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1521 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1522 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1523
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001524- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1525 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1526 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1527 Python itself.
1528
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001529- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1530 the referenced object, if it has one.
1531
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001532- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1533 the thread started at
1534 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1535
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001536- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1537 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1538 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1539 placed on a list index.
1540
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001541- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1542 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1543 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1544 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1545
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001546- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1547 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1548 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1549 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1550 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1551 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1552 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1553
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001554- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1555 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1556 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1557 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1558 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1559
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001560- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1561 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001562
1563- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1564 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1565 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1566 #693195.)
1567
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001568- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1569 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001570
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001571- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001572 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001573 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1574 interpreter executions, would fail.
1575
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001576- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001577 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001578 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001579
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001580Extension modules
1581-----------------
1582
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001583- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1584 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1585 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1586 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1587
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001588- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1589 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1590
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001591- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1592 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1593 and Greg Chapman.)
1594
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001595- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1596 recursively.
1597
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001598- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001599 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1600 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1601 leaks.
1602
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001603- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1604
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001605- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1606 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1607 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1608 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1609 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1610 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1611 #705836.
1612
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001613- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001614 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1615
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001616- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1617 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1618 See SF bug #692416.
1619
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001620- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1621 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1622
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001623- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1624 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1625 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001626
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001627- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001628 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1629 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1630
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001631- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1632 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1633 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1634 timeouts to work properly.
1635
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001636Library
1637-------
1638
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001639- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1640 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1641 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1642 future release.
1643
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001644- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1645 for querying platform dependent features.
1646
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001647- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001648
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001649- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1650 pickle protocol versions.
1651
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001652- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1653 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1654 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1655
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001656- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1657
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001658- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1659 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1660 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1661 modules.
1662
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001663- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1664 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1665 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1666
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001667- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1668 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1669
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001670- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1671 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1672 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1673
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001674- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001675 MS Office extensions.
1676
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001677- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1678 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1679
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001680- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1681 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1682
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001683- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1684 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1685 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1686 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1687 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1688 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1689
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001690- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1691 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1692 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001693
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001694- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1695 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1696 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1697
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001698- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1699
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001700- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1701 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1702 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1703
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001704Tools/Demos
1705-----------
1706
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001707- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1708 See the module docstring for details.
1709
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001710Build
1711-----
1712
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001713- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1714 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001715
1716C API
1717-----
1718
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001719- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1720
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001721- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1722 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1723 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1724
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001725- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1726 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001727
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001728 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1729 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1730 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001731
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001732- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001733 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1734
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001735- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1736 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1737 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001738
1739New platforms
1740-------------
1741
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001742None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001743
1744Tests
1745-----
1746
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001747- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1748 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001749
1750Windows
1751-------
1752
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001753- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1754 function.
1755
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001756- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1757 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001758
1759Mac
1760---
1761
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001762- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1763 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001764
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001765- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1766 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001767
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001768- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1769 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1770 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001771
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001772- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001773 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1774 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001775
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001776- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1777 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001778
1779
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001780What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1781=================================
1782
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001783*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001784
1785Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001786-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001787
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001788- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1789 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1790 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1791
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001792- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1793 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1794 (SF patch #664376.)
1795
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001796- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1797 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1798 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1799 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1800 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1801 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001802 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001803
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001804- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1805 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1806 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1807 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001808 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001809
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001810- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1811 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1812 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1813 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1814 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1815 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1816 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1817 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1818 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1819 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1820 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1821
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001822- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1823 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1824 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1825 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1826 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1827 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1828
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001829- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1830 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1831
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001832- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1833 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1834 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1835 case.)
1836
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001837- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1838 passed as unicode strings.
1839
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001840- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1841 See SF bug #683467.
1842
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001843- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1844 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1845
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001846- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1847
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001848- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1849
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001850- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1851 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1852 arguments.
1853
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001854- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1855 See SF bug #667147.
1856
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001857- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001858 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001859 See SF bug #676155.
1860
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001861- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001862 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001863 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1864 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1865 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1866 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1867 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1868 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001869
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001870Extension modules
1871-----------------
1872
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001873- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1874 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1875 tp_as_number pointer.
1876
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001877- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1878 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1879 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1880 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1881 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1882
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001883- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1884
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001885- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1886
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001887- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001888 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001889 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1890 patch #678531.)
1891
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001892- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1893 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1894
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001895- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1896 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1897
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001898- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1899
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001900- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1901 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1902 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1903
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001904- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1905
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001906- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1907 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1908
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001909- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001910
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001911- datetime changes:
1912
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001913 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1914
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001915 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1916 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1917 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1918 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1919 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1920 now.
1921
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001922 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001923 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1924 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001925
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001926 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001927 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001928 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1929 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1930 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1931 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001932
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001933 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1934 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1935 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001936 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1937
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001938 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1939 by a later example coded by Guido.
1940
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001941 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001942 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1943 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1944 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001945 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1946 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1947
1948 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1949 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1950 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1951 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1952 tzinfo subclass instance.
1953
1954 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1955 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1956 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1957 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1958 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1959 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1960 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1961 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001962
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001963 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1964 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1965 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1966 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1967 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001968 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1969
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001970 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001971
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001972 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1973 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1974 as a naive datetime object.
1975
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001976 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1977 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1978 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1979
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001980 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1981 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1982 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1983 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1984 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1985 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1986 comparison.
1987
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001988 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1989 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1990 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1991 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001992 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001993
1994 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001995
1996 and ::
1997
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001998 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1999
2000 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2001 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2002 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2003 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2004
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002005 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2006 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2007 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2008 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2009 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2010
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002011 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2012 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002013 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2014 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002015
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002016Library
2017-------
2018
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002019- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2020 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2021
2022- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2023 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2024 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2025 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2026 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2027 See PEP 307 for details.
2028
2029- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2030 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2031
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002032- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2033 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002034 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002035 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2036 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002037 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002038
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002039- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2040 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2041
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002042- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2043 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2044 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2045
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002046- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2047
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002048- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2049 exception.
2050
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002051- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2052 class.
2053
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002054- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2055 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2056 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2057
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002058- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2059 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2060
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002061- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002062 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2063 See SF bug #659228.
2064
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002065- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2066 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2067 See SF patch #651082.
2068
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002069- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002070
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002071- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2072 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2073
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002074- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002075 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002076
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002077- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2078 DOS paths from other platforms.
2079
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002080Tools/Demos
2081-----------
2082
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002083- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2084 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2085 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2086 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2087 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2088 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2089 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2090 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2091 example:
2092
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002093 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2094 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002095
2096 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2097
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002098
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002099Build
2100-----
2101
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002102- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2103 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2104 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002105 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2106
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002107 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2108
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002109- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2110 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2111 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2112 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2113 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2114 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2115 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2116 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2117 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2118
2119- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2120 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2121 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2122 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2123
2124- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2125 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2126
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002127C API
2128-----
2129
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002130- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2131 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002132
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002133- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2134 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2135 tp_as_number pointer.
2136
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002137- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2138 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2139 (SF #681367)
2140
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002141- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2142 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2143 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2144 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002145
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002146Tests
2147-----
2148
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002149- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002150 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2151 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2152 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2153 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2154 pydoc.)
2155
2156- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2157
2158- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002159
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002160Windows
2161-------
2162
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002163- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2164 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2165 time).
2166
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002167- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2168 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2169
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002170- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2171 release without strong cryptography.
2172
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002173- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002174 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002175
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002176- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2177 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2178
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002179Mac
2180---
2181
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002182- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2183 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002184
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002185- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2186 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2187 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002188
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002189- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2190 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002191
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002192- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2193 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2194 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2195 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002196
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002197- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002198 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2199 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2200 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002201
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002202
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002203What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002204=================================
2205
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002206*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002207
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002208Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002209--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002210
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002211- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2212
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002213- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2214 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002215 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002216 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002217 a different meaning than before.
2218
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002219- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002220 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002221 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002222
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002223- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002224 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002225 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002226
2227- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2228 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2229 and deallocation.
2230
2231- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2232 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2233
2234- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2235 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2236 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2237 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2238 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2239
2240- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2241 now detected by the garbage collector.
2242
2243- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2244 [SF bug 519621]
2245
2246- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2247 identifier.
2248
2249- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2250 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2251 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2252 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2253 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2254 [SF bug 563060]
2255
2256- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2257 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2258 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2259 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2260 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2261
2262- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2263 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2264 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2265
2266- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2267
2268- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2269 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2270 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2271 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2272 state of the slots would be lost.)
2273
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002274Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002275-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002276
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002277- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002278 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2279 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2280 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2281 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002282 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2283 Jython 2.1.
2284
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002285- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002286 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002287 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2288 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2289 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2290 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2291 these, see PEP 302.
2292
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002293- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2294 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2295 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2296
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002297- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2298 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2299 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2300
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002301- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2302 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2303 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2304
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002305- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2306 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2307 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2308 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2309 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2310 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2311 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2312 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2313 releases or implementations.
2314
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002315- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002316 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2317 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002318
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002319- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2320 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2321
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002322- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2323 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2324 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2325
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002326- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2327 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2328
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002329- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2330 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002331 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2332 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002333
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002334- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2335 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2336 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2337 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2338 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2339
2340 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2341 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2342 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2343 pattern.
2344
2345 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2346 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2347 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2348 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2349
2350 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2351 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2352 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2353 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2354 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2355 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2356
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002357- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2358 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2359 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2360 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2361 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2362 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2363 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2364 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002365
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002366- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2367 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2368 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2369 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2370 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002371 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2372 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2373 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2374 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2375 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2376 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2377 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002378
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002379- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2380 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2381
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002382- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2383 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2384 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2385 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2386 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2387 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2388 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2389 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2390 to Zack Weinberg!
2391
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002392- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2393 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2394 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2395 type. This has been fixed now.
2396
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002397- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2398 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2399 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2400
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002401- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2402 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2403 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2404 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2405 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2406 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2407 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2408 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002409 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002410
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002411- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2412 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2413 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002414
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002415- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2416 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2417 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2418 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2419 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2420 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2421 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2422 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002423 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002424 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2425 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2426
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002427- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2428 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2429 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2430 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2431 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2432 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2433 this.)
2434
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002435- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2436 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002437 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002438 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002439 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2440 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002441 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2442 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002443
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002444- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2445 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2446 currently running.
2447
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002448- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2449 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2450 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2451 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2452
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002453- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2454 as directory names.
2455
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002456- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2457 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2458
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002459- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2460 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2461
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002462- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002463 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2464 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002465
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002466- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2467 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2468 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2469 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2470 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2471
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002472- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2473 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2474 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2475 removed.
2476
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002477- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2478 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2479 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2480
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002481- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2482 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2483 to __debug__.
2484
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002485- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2486 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2487 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2488
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002489- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2490 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2491 deprecated now.
2492
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002493- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2494 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2495 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002496
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002497- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2498 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2499 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2500 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2501 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002502
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002503- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2504 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2505
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002506- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2507 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2508 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002509 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002510 is backward compatible.
2511
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002512- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2513 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2514 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2515 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2516 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2517
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002518- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2519 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2520 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2521 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2522 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2523 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002524
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002525- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2526 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2527
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002528- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2529 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2530
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002531- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2532 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2533 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2534 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2535 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2536
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002537- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2538 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2539 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2540
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002541- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002542 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2543
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002544- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2545 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2546 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002547
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002548- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2549 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2550
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002551- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2552 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2553 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2554
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002555- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2556
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002557Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002558-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002559
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002560- Added three operators to the operator module:
2561 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2562 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2563 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2564
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002565- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2566
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002567- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2568 archives.
2569
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002570- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2571 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2572 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2573
2574 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2575
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002576- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2577 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2578 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002579 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002580
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002581- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2582 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2583 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2584 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002585 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2586 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2587 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2588 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002589
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002590- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2591 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002592
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002593- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2594
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002595- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2596 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2597
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002598- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2599 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2600 supported.
2601
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002602- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2603
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002604- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2605 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002606
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002607- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2608 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2609
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002610- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2611
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002612- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2613 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2614
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002615- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2616 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2617 functions but callable type objects.
2618
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002619- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002620 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002621 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002622
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002623- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2624 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002625
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002626- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2627 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002628
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002629- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2630 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2631 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2632 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2633
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002634- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2635 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002636
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002637- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2638 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2639 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2640 and __imul__.
2641
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002642- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002643 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2644 is called.
2645
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002646- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2647 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2648 interpreter was compiled.
2649
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002650- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2651 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2652 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002653 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002654 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2655 1, not 2.
2656
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002657- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2658 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2659 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2660 limit.
2661
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002662- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2663 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2664 bug #623464.
2665
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002666- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2667 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2668 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2669 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2670
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002671Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002672-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002673
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002674- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2675
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002676- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2677 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2678 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2679 with Python 2.3a2.
2680
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002681- os.path exposes getctime.
2682
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002683- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002684 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002685 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002686 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002687 unit tests of floating point results.
2688
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002689- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2690 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2691 has been increased.
2692
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002693- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2694 executed.
2695
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002696- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2697 postinstallation script.
2698
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002699- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2700 test the current module.
2701
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002702- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002703 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2704 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2705 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2706 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2707
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002708- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002709 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002710 Ward's Optik package.
2711
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002712- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2713 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2714 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2715 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2716
2717- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2718 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002719 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002720
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002721- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2722 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2723 shelf are binary pickles.
2724
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002725- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2726 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2727
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002728- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2729 modules are iterators now.
2730
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002731- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2732 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2733 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2734 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2735 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2736 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002737
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002738- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2739 with their entity value.
2740
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002741- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2742
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002743- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2744 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002745
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002746- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2747 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002748 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002749
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002750- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2751 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2752 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2753 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2754 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2755 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2756 main():
2757
2758 import locale
2759 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2760
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002761- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2762 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2763
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002764- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2765 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2766 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2767 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2768 to the new standard.
2769
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002770- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2771 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2772 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2773 an extension to the database.
2774
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002775- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2776 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2777 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2778 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002779 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002780
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002781- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002782 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002783
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002784- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2785 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2786 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2787 bounded integers.
2788
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002789- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2790 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2791 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2792 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2793 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2794 in existence.
2795
2796 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2797 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2798 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2799 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2800 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2801 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2802
2803 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2804 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2805 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2806 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2807
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002808- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2809 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2810 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2811
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002812- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2813
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002814- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2815 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2816 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2817 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2818
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002819- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2820 argument.
2821
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002822- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2823 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2824 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2825 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2826 [SF patch 560794].
2827
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002828- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2829 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2830 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002831 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2832 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2833 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002834
2835- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2836 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002837
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002838- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2839 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2840 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2841 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002842
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002843- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2844 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2845 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2846 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2847 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2848
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002849- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002850
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002851- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2852
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002853- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2854 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2855 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2856 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2857 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2858 identical to None.
2859
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002860- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2861 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2862 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2863 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2864 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2865 results now.
2866
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002867- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2868 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2869
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002870- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2871 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2872 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2873 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2874 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2875 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2876 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2877 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2878
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002879- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2880
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002881- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2882 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2883
2884- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2885 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2886 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2887 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2888 and other systems.
2889
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002890- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2891 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2892 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2893 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 +00002894 work well with these.
2895
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002896- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2897
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002898- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002899 connections.
2900
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002901- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2902 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2903 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2904
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002905- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2906 sets
2907
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002908- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2909 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2910 name.
2911
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002912- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2913 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2914 passed in.
2915
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002916- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002917 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002918 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2919 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002920
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002921- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2922
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002923- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2924
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002925- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2926 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2927 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2928
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002929- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2930 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2931 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2932 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002933 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002934
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002935- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002936 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002937 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002938
2939- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2940 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2941 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2942
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002943- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002944 the value of its expression argument.
2945
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002946- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2947 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2948 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2949
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002950- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2951 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2952 skipstone browser was included.
2953
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002954- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2955 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2956
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002957Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002958-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002959
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002960- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2961 names in addition to accepting file names.
2962
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002963- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2964 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2965 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2966 still used and useful.)
2967
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002968- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2969 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2970 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2971 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002972
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002973- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2974 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2975 the generated binary.
2976
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002977Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002978-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002979
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002980- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2981
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002982- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2983 except in the hands of experts.
2984
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002985- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002986 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2987 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2988 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002989
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002990- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2991 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2992 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2993 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2994 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2995 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2996 builds.
2997
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002998- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2999 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3000 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3001 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3002 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3003 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3004 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3005 new type.
3006
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003007- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003008
3009 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3010 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3011 positive infinities.
3012
3013 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3014 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3015 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3016 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3017 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3018 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3019 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3020
3021 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3022
3023 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3024
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003025- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3026 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3027 size of the executable.
3028
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003029- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3030 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3031 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3032 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003033
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003034- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3035
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003036- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3037 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3038 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003039
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003040- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3041 well as Unix.
3042
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003043- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3044 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3045 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3046 modules in the README file for details.
3047
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003048C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003049-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003050
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003051- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3052 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003053 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003054 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003055 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003056
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003057- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3058 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3059 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3060 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3061 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3062 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003063 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003064 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3065 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3066 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3067 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3068 aligned.)
3069
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003070- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3071 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3072 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3073
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003074- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3075 level.
3076
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003077- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3078 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3079 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3080 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3081 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3082
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003083- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3084 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3085 code.
3086
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003087- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3088 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3089 adjusting for negative indices.
3090
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003091- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3092 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3093 object.
3094
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003095- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3096 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3097 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3098
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003099- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3100 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003101
3102- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3103
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003104- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3105 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3106 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3107 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3108
3109- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3110
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003111- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003112
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003113- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003114 without going through the buffer API.
3115
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003116- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003117
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003118- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3119 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3120 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3121 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3122
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003123- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3124 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3125
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003126- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003127 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3128
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003129New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003130-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003131
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003132- OpenVMS is now supported.
3133
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003134- AtheOS is now supported.
3135
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003136- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3137
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003138- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3139
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003140Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003141-----
3142
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003143- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3144 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3145 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003146
3147Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003148-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003149
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003150- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3151 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3152 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3153 bugs.
3154 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003155 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003156 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3157 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003158 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003159
3160- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003161 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003162
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003163- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3164 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3165
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003166- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3167 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003168 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003169 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3170
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003171- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3172 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3173 use files" uninstall option).
3174
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003175- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3176
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003177- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3178 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3179
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003180- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3181 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3182 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3183
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003184- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3185 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3186 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3187 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3188 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003189 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3190 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3191 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003192
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003193- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003194 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003195 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3196 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3197 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3198 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3199 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3200 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3201 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3202 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3203 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3204 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3205 work around.
3206
3207- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3208 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3209 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3210 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3211 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3212 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3213 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3214 specified with O_CREAT too).
3215
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003216Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003217----
3218
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003219- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003220
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003221- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3222 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3223 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3224
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003225- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3226 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3227 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3228
3229- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3230 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3231 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3232 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3233 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3234 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3235 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3236 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003237
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003238- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3239 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3240 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003241
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003242- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3243 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3244 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3245 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3246 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003247
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003248- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3249 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3250 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003251
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003252- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3253 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003254
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003255- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3256 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3257 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3258 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3259 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003260
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003261- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3262 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3263 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3264
3265- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3266 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3267 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003268
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003269- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3270 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3271 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3272 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003273 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003274
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003275- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3276 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003277
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003278- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3279 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003280
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003281- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003282 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003283 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3284 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003285
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003286
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003287What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003288===============================
3289
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003290*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3291
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003292Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003293--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003294
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003295- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3296 with a custom metaclass.
3297
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003298Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003299-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003300
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003301- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3302 are proxies.
3303
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003304Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003305-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003306
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003307- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3308 very short strings.
3309
3310- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3311 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3312 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3313 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3314 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3315
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003316Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003317-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003318
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003319- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3320 close or delete time).
3321
3322- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3323 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3324
3325- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3326
3327- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003328 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003329
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003330Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003331-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003332
3333Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003334-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003335
3336C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003337-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003338
3339New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003340-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003341
3342Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003343-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003344
3345Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003346-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003347
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003348- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3349
3350- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3351 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3352
3353- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3354 deleted at process exit time.
3355
3356- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3357 in backslash.
3358
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003359Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003360----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003361
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003362- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3363 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3364 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3365
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003366
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003367What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003368===========================
3369
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003370*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3371
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003372Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003373--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003374
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003375- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3376 been extensively updated. See
3377
3378 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3379
3380 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3381
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003382- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3383 deleted!
3384
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003385- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3386 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3387 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3388 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3389 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3390
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003391- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3392
3393 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3394 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3395
3396 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3397 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3398 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3399 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3400 supported anyway.
3401
3402 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3403 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3404
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003405- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3406 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3407 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3408 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3409 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003410
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003411- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3412 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3413 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3414
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003415Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003416-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003417
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003418- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3419 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3420 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3421 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3422 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3423 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003424 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3425 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3426 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3427 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003428
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003429- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3430 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3431 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3432
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003433Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003434-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003435
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003436- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3437
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003438Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003439-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003440
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003441- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3442 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3443 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3444 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3445 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3446 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3447
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003448- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3449
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003450- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3451
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003452- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3453
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003454- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3455 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3456 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3457
3458- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3459
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003460Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003461-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003462
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003463- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3464 off a search on Google.
3465
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003466Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003467-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003468
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003469- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3470 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3471 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3472 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3473 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3474 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3475 other platforms should do likewise.
3476
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003477- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3478 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3479 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3480
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003481C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003482-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003483
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003484- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3485 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3486 producing key-value pairs.
3487
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003488- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003489 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003490 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3491 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3492 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3493 previously went unchallenged.
3494
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003495New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003496-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003497
3498Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003499-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003500
3501Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003502-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003503
3504Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003505----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003506
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003507- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3508 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003509
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003510- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3511 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3512 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3513 home.
3514
3515
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003516What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003517===========================
3518
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003519*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3520
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003521Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003522--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003523
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003524- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3525 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003526
3527 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003528 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003529
3530 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3531 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003532 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003533 This needs to be documented.
3534
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003535- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3536 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3537
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003538- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3539 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3540 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3541
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003542- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3543 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3544
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003545- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3546 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3547 class forbids it).
3548
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003549- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3550 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3551 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3552
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003553- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3554
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003555Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003556-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003557
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003558- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3559 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003560 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003561
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003562- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3563 (like 1 + '').
3564
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003565Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003566-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003567
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003568- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3569 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3570 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3571 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003572 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003573 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3574
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003575- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3576 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3577 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3578 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3579
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003580- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3581 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003582 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3583 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3584 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003585
3586- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3587 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003588
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003589- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3590 bytes on its input.
3591
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003592Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003593-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003594
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003595- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003596 convenience function.
3597
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003598- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3599 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3600 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003601 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3602 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3603 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3604 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3605 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3606 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003607
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003608- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3609 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3610 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3611 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3612
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003613- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3614 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3615 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3616
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003617- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3618 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3619 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3620 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3621
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003622- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3623 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003624 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003625 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3626 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3627 new -l and -e options.
3628
3629- statcache is now deprecated.
3630
3631- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3632 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003633 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003634 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3635 time properly taken into account.
3636
3637- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3638 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3639 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3640 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3641
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003642Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003643-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003644
3645Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003646-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003647
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003648- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3649 is built with libdb3 if available.
3650
3651- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3652
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003653C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003654-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003655
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003656- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3657 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3658 PySequence_Size().
3659
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003660- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3661
3662- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3663 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3664 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3665
3666- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3667 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3668
3669- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3670 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3671
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003672New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003673-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003674
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003675- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3676 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3677
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003678- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3679 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3680
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003681- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3682
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003683Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003684-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003685
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003686- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3687 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3688
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003689Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003690-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003691
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003692Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003693----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003694
3695- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3696 removed completely in the next release.
3697
3698- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3699 OSX.
3700
3701- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3702 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3703
3704- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3705
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003706
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003707What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003708===========================
3709
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003710*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3711
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003712Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003713--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003714
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003715- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003716 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003717 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003718 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3719 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003720 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3721 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003722 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3723 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003724
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003725- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3726 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3727
3728- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3729 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3730
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003731Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003732-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003733
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003734- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3735 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3736 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3737 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3738 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3739 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3740 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3741 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3742
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003743- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3744 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3745 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3746 example).
3747
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003748- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003749 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003750 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003751 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003752
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003753- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3754 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3755 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003756 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003757
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003758- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3759 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3760 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3761 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3762 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3763 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3764
3765 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3766
3767 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3768
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003769Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003770-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003771
3772- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3773
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003774- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3775
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003776- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3777 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003778
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003779- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3780 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3781 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3782 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3783 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3784 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003785 attributes.
3786
3787- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3788 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3789 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003790
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003791- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3792 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3793 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003794
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003795- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3796 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3797 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003798 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3799 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3800
3801- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3802 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003803
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003804Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003805-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003806
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003807- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3808 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3809
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003810- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3811 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3812 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3813 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3814
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003815- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3816 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3817 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3818 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3819
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003820 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3821 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3822 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3823 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3824 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3825 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3826 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3827 without losing information).
3828
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003829- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003830 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3831 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3832 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3833 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3834 module).
3835
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003836 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003837 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3838 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3839 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3840 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003841
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003842- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003843 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3844 encoding.
3845
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003846- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3847 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3848
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003849- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003850 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3851
3852- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3853 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3854 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3855 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3856
3857- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3858
3859- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3860 ON, and OFF.
3861
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003862- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3863 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3864
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003865Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003866-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003867
3868- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3869 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3870 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003871
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003872- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3873 been added: -X and -E.
3874
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003875Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003876-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003877
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003878- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3879 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3880
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003881C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003882-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003883
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003884- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3885 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3886 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3887 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3888 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3889
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003890- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3891 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3892 as long) arguments.
3893
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003894- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3895 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3896 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3897 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3898 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3899 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3900
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003901- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3902 input.
3903
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003904New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003905-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003906
3907Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003908-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003909
3910Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003911-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003912
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003913- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3914 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3915 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3916
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003917- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3918 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3919 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003920 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003921
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003922 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3923 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3924 import signal
3925 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003926
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003927 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003928 while 1:
3929 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003930 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003931 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3932 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3933 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3934 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003935
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003936
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003937What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3938===========================
3939
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003940*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3941
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003942Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003943--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003944
3945- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3946 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3947 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3948
3949- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3950 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3951 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3952 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3953 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3954 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3955 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003956
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003957- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003958 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003959 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3960 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3961 associate a docstring with a property.
3962
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003963- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3964 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3965 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3966 other built-in object types.
3967
3968- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3969 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3970 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3971 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3972 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3973
3974- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3975 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3976
3977- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3978 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003979 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003980 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3981 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3982 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3983 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3984 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3985
3986- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3987 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3988 class.
3989
3990- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3991 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3992 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3993 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3994
3995- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3996 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3997 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3998 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3999
4000- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4001 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4002
4003- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4004 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4005 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4006 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4007 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004008 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004009 with the same value as s.
4010
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004011- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4012
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004013Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004014----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004015
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004016- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4017
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004018- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4019 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4020 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4021 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4022 objects.
4023
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004024- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4025 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004026 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4027 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4028
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004029- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4030 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4031 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4032
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004033Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004034-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004035
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004036- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4037 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4038 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4039 by the instances.
4040
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004041- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4042 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4043 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4044
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004045- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4046 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4047 before the entire comparison is complete.
4048
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004049- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4050 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4051 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4052
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004053- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4054 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4055 getwriter().
4056
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004057- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4058 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4059
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004060- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004061 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4062 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4063
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004064- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4065 iterable object.
4066
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004067- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4068 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004069
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004070- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4071 authentication.
4072
4073- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4074 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004075
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004076- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004077 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4078 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4079 a sample driver.)
4080
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004081Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004082-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004083
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004084- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4085 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4086 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4087 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4088 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4089 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4090 kernel has large file support.
4091
4092- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4093 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4094 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4095 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4096 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4097
4098- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4099 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4100 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4101
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004102C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004103-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004104
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004105- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4106 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4107
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004108New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004109-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004110
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004111- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4112 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4113
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004114Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004115-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004116
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004117- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4118 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4119 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4120 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4121 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4122
4123- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4124 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4125 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4126 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4127
4128- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4129 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4130
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004131Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004132-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004133
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004134- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004135 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4136 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004137
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004138
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004139What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4140===========================
4141
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004142*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4143
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004144Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004145----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004146
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004147- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4148 big to represent as a C double.
4149
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004150- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4151 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4152 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4153 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4154 restriction).
4155
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004156- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4157 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4158 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4159 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4160 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4161
4162 >>> dir([])
4163 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4164 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4165 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4166 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4167 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4168 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4169 'reverse', 'sort']
4170
4171 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4172
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004173- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004174 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4175 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4176 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4177 OverflowError exception.
4178
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004179- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004180 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004181 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4182 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4183 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4184 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4185 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004186 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004187 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4188 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4189
4190 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4191 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4192 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4193 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004194
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004195- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004196 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4197 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4198 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4199 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4200 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4201 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4202 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4203 once it is created.
4204
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004205- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4206 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4207 (key, value) pairs.
4208
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004209- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004210 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4211 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4212
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004213- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4214 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4215 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4216 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4217 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004218
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004219- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004220 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4221 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4222
4223 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4224
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004225- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004226 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4227
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004228Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004229-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004230
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004231- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004232 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4233 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004234
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004235- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4236 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4237 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4238 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4239 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4240 in this area anymore).
4241
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004242- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4243 threading.Timer.
4244
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004245- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4246 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4247
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004248- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004249 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4250
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004251- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004252 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4253 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4254 converted to Python longs.
4255
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004256- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004257 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4258
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004259- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4260 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4261 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4262
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004263Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004264-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004265
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004266- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4267 division operators as per PEP 238.
4268
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004269Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004270-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004271
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004272- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4273 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4274 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4275 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4276
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004277C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004278-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004279
4280- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004281
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004282- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4283 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004284 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004285
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004286 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4287 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004288 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004289 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004290
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004291- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004292 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4293 module:
4294
4295 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004296
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004297 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4298 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004299
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004300 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4301 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004302
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004303 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4304
4305 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4306
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004307- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004308 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4309 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4310 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004311
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004312New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004313-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004314
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004315- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4316 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4317 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4318 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4319 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004320
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004321Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004322-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004323
4324Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004325-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004326
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004327- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4328 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4329 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4330 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004331 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4332 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4333 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4334 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4335 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004336
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004337- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004338 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4339
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004340
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004341What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4342===========================
4343
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004344*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4345
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004346Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004347-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004348
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004349- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4350 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4351
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004352- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4353 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4354 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004355
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004356- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4357 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4358 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4359 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004360
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004361- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4362
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004363- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004364
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004365Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004366-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004367
4368- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004369 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004370 the module docstring for details.
4371
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004372Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004373-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004374
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004375- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004376 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4377 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4378 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004379
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004380- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4381 Nick Mathewson.
4382
4383Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004384----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004385
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004386- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4387 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4388 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4389 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4390 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4391 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4392 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4393 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4394
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004395- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4396 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4397 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4398 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4399
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004400- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4401 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4402 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4403 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4404 come a long way).
4405
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004406- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4407 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4408 write filters for these warnings).
4409
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004410- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4411 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4412 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4413 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4414 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4415
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004416- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4417 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4418 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4419 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4420 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4421 older distribution.
4422
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004423Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004424-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004425
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004426- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4427 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004428 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004429
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004430- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4431 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4432 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4433
4434- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4435
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004436- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4437
4438- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4439
4440- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4441
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004443
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004444- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4445
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004446New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004447-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004448
4449C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004450-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004451
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004452- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4453 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4454 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4455 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4456 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4457 against buffer overruns.
4458
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004459- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004460 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4461 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004462 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4463 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4464 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4465
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004466- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4467 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4468 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4469 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4470 deprecated.
4471
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004472Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004473-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004474
4475- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4476 relevant is found.
4477
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004478
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004479What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004480===========================
4481
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004482*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4483
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004484Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004485----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004486
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004487- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4488 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4489 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4490 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4491 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4492 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4493 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4494 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004495 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004496 repaired.
4497
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004498- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004499 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004500 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4501 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4502 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4503 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4504 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4505 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4506 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4507 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4508
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004509- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4510 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4511 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4512 leading BMO character).
4513
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004514- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4515 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4516 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4517
4518 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4519 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4520 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004521
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004522 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4523 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4524 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4525 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4526 for various simple to use conversions.
4527
4528 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4529 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4530
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004531 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4532 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4533 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4534 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4535 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4536 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4537 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4538 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4539 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4540 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4541 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4542 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4543 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4544 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4545 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004546
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004547- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4548 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4549 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004550 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004551 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004552
4553 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004554 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4555 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4556 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4557 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4558 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004559 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4560 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004561
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004562 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4563 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4564 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004565 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004566
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004567- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4568 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4569 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4570 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4571 floating arithmetic,
4572
4573 x = 9007199254740992.0
4574 print long(x)
4575
4576 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4577 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4578 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4579 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4580 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4581 functions are of good quality).
4582
4583 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4584 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4585 algorithms to break.
4586
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004587- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4588 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4589 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4590 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4591 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4592 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4593 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4594 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4595 order.
4596
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004597- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4598 operation along the most common code paths.
4599
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004600- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4601 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4602
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004603- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4604 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4605 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4606 {}.update(UserDict())
4607
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004608- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4609 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4610 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4611 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4612 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4613 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4614 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4615 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4616
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004617- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004618 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004619
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004620 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004621 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4622 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004623 join() method of strings
4624 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004625 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4626 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004627 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004628 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004629
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004630- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4631 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4632
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004633- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4634 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4635
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004636- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4637 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4638 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4639 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4640
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004641- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4642 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004643 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004644 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4645 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004646
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004647- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4648
4649
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004650Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004651-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004652
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004653- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004654 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004655 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4656 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4657
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004658- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4659 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4660
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004661- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4662 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4663 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4664 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4665
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004666- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4667 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4668 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4669
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004670- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4671
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004672- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4673
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004674- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4675 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4676 that are still imported into string.py).
4677
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004678- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4679
4680- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4681 Now it does.
4682
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004683- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4684
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004685- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4686 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4687 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4688 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4689 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004690 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4691 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004692
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004693- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4694 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4695 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4696 'help(object)'.
4697
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004698Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004699-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004700
4701- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004702 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004703 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4704 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4705
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004706- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004707 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4708 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004709
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004710C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004711-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004712
4713- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4714 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004715
4716----
4717
4718**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**