blob: 2e6c5367cdaff251ef7c9df712c2f6ba8c5211e4 [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +000015- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
16 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
17 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
18 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
19 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
20
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +000021- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
22 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +000023
24- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
25 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
26 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
27 #693195.)
28
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +000029- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
30 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000031
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000032- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +000033 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +000034 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
35 interpreter executions, would fail.
36
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000037- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +000038 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +000039 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +000040
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000041Extension modules
42-----------------
43
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +000044- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
45
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +000046- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
47 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
48 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
49 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
50 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
51 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
52 #705836.
53
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +000054- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzet()
55 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
56
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +000057- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
58 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
59 See SF bug #692416.
60
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +000061- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
62 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
63
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +000064- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
65 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
66 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000067
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +000068- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
69 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
70 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
71 timeouts to work properly.
72
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000073Library
74-------
75
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +000076- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
77 MS Office extensions.
78
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +000079- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
80 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
81
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +000082- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
83 execution speed of expressions and statements.
84
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +000085- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
86 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
87 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
88 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
89 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
90 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
91
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +000092- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
93 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
94 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +000095
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +000096- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
97 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
98 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
99
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +0000100- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
101
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000102Tools/Demos
103-----------
104
105TBD
106
107Build
108-----
109
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +0000110- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
111 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000112
113C API
114-----
115
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +0000116- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG.
117
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +0000118- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +0000119 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
120
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +0000121- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
122 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
123 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000124
125New platforms
126-------------
127
128TBD
129
130Tests
131-----
132
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +0000133- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
134 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000135
136Windows
137-------
138
139TBD
140
141Mac
142---
143
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +0000144- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
145 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +0000146
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +0000147- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
148 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000149
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +0000150- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
151 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
152 before displaying.
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +0000153
154- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
155 be used by mere mortals.
156
157- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
158 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000159
160
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000161What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
162=================================
163
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000164*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000165
166Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000167-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000168
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +0000169- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
170 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
171 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
172
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +0000173- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
174 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
175 (SF patch #664376.)
176
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000177- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
178 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
179 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
180 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
181 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
182 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +0000183 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +0000184
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000185- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
186 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
187 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
188 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000189 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +0000190
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +0000191- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
192 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
193 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
194 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
195 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
196 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
197 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
198 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
199 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
200 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
201 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
202
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +0000203- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
204 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
205 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
206 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
207 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
208 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
209
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +0000210- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
211 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
212
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +0000213- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
214 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
215 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
216 case.)
217
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +0000218- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
219 passed as unicode strings.
220
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +0000221- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
222 See SF bug #683467.
223
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +0000224- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
225 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
226
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +0000227- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
228
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +0000229- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
230
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +0000231- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
232 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
233 arguments.
234
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +0000235- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
236 See SF bug #667147.
237
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000238- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000239 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +0000240 See SF bug #676155.
241
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000242- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000243 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +0000244 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
245 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
246 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
247 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
248 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
249 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +0000250
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000251Extension modules
252-----------------
253
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000254- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
255 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
256 tp_as_number pointer.
257
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +0000258- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
259 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
260 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
261 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
262 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
263
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000264- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
265
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +0000266- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
267
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000268- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +0000269 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +0000270 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
271 patch #678531.)
272
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +0000273- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
274 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
275
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +0000276- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
277 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
278
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +0000279- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
280
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +0000281- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
282 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
283 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
284
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000285- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
286
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000287- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
288 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
289
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000290- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000291
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000292- datetime changes:
293
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +0000294 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
295 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
296 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
297 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
298 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
299 now.
300
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000301 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000302 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
303 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +0000304
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000305 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000306 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000307 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
308 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
309 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
310 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000311
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000312 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
313 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
314 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +0000315 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
316
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +0000317 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
318 by a later example coded by Guido.
319
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000320 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000321 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
322 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
323 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +0000324 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
325 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
326
327 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
328 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
329 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
330 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
331 tzinfo subclass instance.
332
333 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
334 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
335 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
336 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
337 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
338 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
339 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
340 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +0000341
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000342 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
343 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
344 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
345 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
346 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000347 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
348
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000349 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000350
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +0000351 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
352 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
353 as a naive datetime object.
354
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +0000355 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
356 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
357 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
358
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000359 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
360 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
361 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
362 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
363 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
364 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
365 comparison.
366
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000367 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
368 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
369 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
370 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000371 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000372
373 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000374
375 and ::
376
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000377 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
378
379 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
380 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
381 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
382 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
383
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000384 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
385 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
386 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
387 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
388 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
389
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000390 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
391 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +0000392 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
393 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +0000394
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000395Library
396-------
397
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000398- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
399 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
400
401- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
402 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
403 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
404 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
405 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
406 See PEP 307 for details.
407
408- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
409 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
410
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000411- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
412 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000413 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000414 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
415 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +0000416 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +0000417
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +0000418- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
419 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
420
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000421- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
422 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
423 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
424
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000425- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
426
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000427- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
428 exception.
429
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000430- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
431 class.
432
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000433- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
434 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
435 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
436
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000437- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
438 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
439
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000440- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000441 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
442 See SF bug #659228.
443
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000444- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
445 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
446 See SF patch #651082.
447
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000448- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000449
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000450- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
451 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
452
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000453- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000454 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +0000455
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +0000456- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
457 DOS paths from other platforms.
458
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000459Tools/Demos
460-----------
461
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000462- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
463 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
464 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
465 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
466 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
467 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
468 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
469 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
470 example:
471
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +0000472 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
473 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000474
475 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
476
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000477
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000478Build
479-----
480
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000481- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
482 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
483 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000484 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
485
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +0000486 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
487
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000488- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
489 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
490 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
491 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
492 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
493 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
494 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
495 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
496 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
497
498- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
499 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
500 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
501 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
502
503- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
504 from the Tools/scripts directory.
505
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000506C API
507-----
508
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +0000509- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
510 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +0000511
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +0000512- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
513 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
514 tp_as_number pointer.
515
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +0000516- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
517 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
518 (SF #681367)
519
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +0000520- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
521 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
522 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
523 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000524
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000525Tests
526-----
527
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +0000528- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000529 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
530 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
531 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
532 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
533 pydoc.)
534
535- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
536
537- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000538
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000539Windows
540-------
541
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +0000542- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
543 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
544 time).
545
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +0000546- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
547 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
548
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000549- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
550 release without strong cryptography.
551
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000552- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +0000553 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000554
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000555- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
556 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
557
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000558Mac
559---
560
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000561- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
562 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +0000563
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +0000564- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
565 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
566 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +0000567
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +0000568- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
569 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000570
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000571- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
572 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
573 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
574 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +0000575
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +0000576- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +0000577 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
578 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
579 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000580
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000581
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000582What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000583=================================
584
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000585*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000586
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000587Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000588--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000589
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000590- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
591
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000592- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
593 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000594 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000595 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000596 a different meaning than before.
597
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000598- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000599 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000600 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000601
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000602- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000603 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000604 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000605
606- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
607 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
608 and deallocation.
609
610- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
611 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
612
613- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
614 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
615 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
616 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
617 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
618
619- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
620 now detected by the garbage collector.
621
622- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
623 [SF bug 519621]
624
625- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
626 identifier.
627
628- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
629 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
630 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
631 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
632 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
633 [SF bug 563060]
634
635- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
636 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
637 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
638 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
639 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
640
641- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
642 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
643 not called. [SF bug #537450]
644
645- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
646
647- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
648 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
649 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
650 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
651 state of the slots would be lost.)
652
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000653Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000654-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000655
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000656- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000657 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
658 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
659 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
660 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000661 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
662 Jython 2.1.
663
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +0000664- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000665 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000666 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
667 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
668 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
669 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
670 these, see PEP 302.
671
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000672- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
673 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
674 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
675
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000676- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
677 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
678 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
679
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000680- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
681 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
682 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
683
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000684- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
685 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
686 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
687 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
688 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
689 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
690 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
691 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
692 releases or implementations.
693
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000694- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000695 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
696 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000697
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000698- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
699 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
700
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000701- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
702 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
703 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
704
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000705- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
706 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
707
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000708- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
709 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000710 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
711 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000712
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000713- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
714 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
715 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
716 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
717 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
718
719 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
720 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
721 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
722 pattern.
723
724 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
725 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
726 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
727 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
728
729 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
730 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
731 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
732 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
733 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
734 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
735
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000736- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
737 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
738 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
739 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
740 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
741 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
742 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
743 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000744
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000745- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
746 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
747 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
748 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
749 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000750 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
751 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
752 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
753 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
754 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
755 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
756 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000757
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000758- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
759 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
760
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000761- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
762 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
763 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
764 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
765 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
766 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
767 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
768 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
769 to Zack Weinberg!
770
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000771- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
772 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
773 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
774 type. This has been fixed now.
775
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000776- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
777 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
778 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
779
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000780- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
781 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
782 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
783 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
784 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
785 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
786 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
787 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000788 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000789
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000790- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
791 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
792 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000793
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000794- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
795 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
796 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
797 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
798 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
799 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
800 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
801 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000802 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000803 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
804 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
805
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000806- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
807 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
808 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
809 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
810 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
811 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
812 this.)
813
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000814- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
815 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000816 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000817 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000818 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
819 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000820 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
821 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000822
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000823- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
824 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
825 currently running.
826
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000827- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
828 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
829 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
830 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
831
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000832- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
833 as directory names.
834
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000835- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
836 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
837
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000838- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
839 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
840
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000841- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000842 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
843 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000844
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000845- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
846 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
847 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
848 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
849 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
850
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000851- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
852 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
853 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
854 removed.
855
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000856- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
857 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
858 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
859
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000860- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
861 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
862 to __debug__.
863
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000864- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
865 string to the left with zeros. For example,
866 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
867
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000868- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
869 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
870 deprecated now.
871
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000872- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
873 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
874 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000875
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000876- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
877 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
878 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
879 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
880 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000881
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000882- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
883 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
884
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000885- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
886 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
887 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000888 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000889 is backward compatible.
890
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000891- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
892 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
893 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
894 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
895 could access a pointer to freed memory.
896
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000897- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
898 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
899 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
900 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
901 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
902 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000903
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000904- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
905 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
906
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000907- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
908 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
909
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000910- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
911 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
912 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
913 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
914 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
915
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000916- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
917 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
918 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
919
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000920- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000921 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
922
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000923- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
924 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
925 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000926
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000927- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
928 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
929
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000930- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
931 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
932 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
933
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000934- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
935
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000936Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000937-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000938
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000939- Added three operators to the operator module:
940 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
941 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
942 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
943
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000944- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
945
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000946- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
947 archives.
948
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000949- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
950 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
951 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
952
953 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
954
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000955- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
956 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
957 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000958 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000959
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000960- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
961 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
962 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
963 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +0000964 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
965 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
966 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
967 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000968
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000969- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
970 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000971
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000972- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
973
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000974- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
975 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
976
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000977- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
978 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
979 supported.
980
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000981- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
982
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000983- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
984 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000985
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000986- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
987 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
988
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000989- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
990
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000991- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
992 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
993
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000994- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
995 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
996 functions but callable type objects.
997
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000998- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000999 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001000 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00001001
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00001002- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
1003 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00001004
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00001005- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
1006 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00001007
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00001008- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
1009 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
1010 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
1011 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
1012
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00001013- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
1014 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00001015
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00001016- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
1017 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
1018 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
1019 and __imul__.
1020
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00001021- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00001022 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
1023 is called.
1024
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00001025- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
1026 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
1027 interpreter was compiled.
1028
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001029- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
1030 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
1031 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001032 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00001033 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
1034 1, not 2.
1035
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00001036- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
1037 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
1038 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
1039 limit.
1040
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00001041- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
1042 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
1043 bug #623464.
1044
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00001045- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
1046 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
1047 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
1048 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
1049
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001050Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001051-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001052
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00001053- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
1054
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00001055- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
1056 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
1057 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
1058 with Python 2.3a2.
1059
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00001060- os.path exposes getctime.
1061
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001062- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001063 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001064 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001065 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001066 unit tests of floating point results.
1067
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00001068- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
1069 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
1070 has been increased.
1071
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001072- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
1073 executed.
1074
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00001075- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
1076 postinstallation script.
1077
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00001078- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
1079 test the current module.
1080
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001081- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00001082 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
1083 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
1084 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
1085 this behavior needs to be controlled.
1086
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001087- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001088 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00001089 Ward's Optik package.
1090
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001091- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
1092 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
1093 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
1094 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
1095
1096- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
1097 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001098 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00001099
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00001100- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
1101 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
1102 shelf are binary pickles.
1103
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00001104- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
1105 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
1106
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00001107- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
1108 modules are iterators now.
1109
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00001110- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
1111 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
1112 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
1113 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
1114 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
1115 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001116
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00001117- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
1118 with their entity value.
1119
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00001120- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
1121
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001122- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
1123 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00001124
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00001125- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
1126 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00001127 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00001128
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00001129- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
1130 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
1131 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
1132 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
1133 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
1134 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
1135 main():
1136
1137 import locale
1138 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
1139
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00001140- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
1141 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
1142
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00001143- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
1144 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
1145 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
1146 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
1147 to the new standard.
1148
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00001149- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
1150 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
1151 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
1152 an extension to the database.
1153
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001154- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
1155 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
1156 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
1157 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00001158 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00001159
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001160- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001161 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00001162
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001163- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
1164 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
1165 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
1166 bounded integers.
1167
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00001168- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
1169 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
1170 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
1171 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
1172 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
1173 in existence.
1174
1175 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
1176 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
1177 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
1178 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
1179 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
1180 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
1181
1182 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
1183 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
1184 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
1185 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
1186
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00001187- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
1188 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
1189 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
1190
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00001191- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
1192
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001193- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
1194 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
1195 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
1196 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
1197
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00001198- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
1199 argument.
1200
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00001201- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
1202 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
1203 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
1204 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
1205 [SF patch 560794].
1206
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001207- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
1208 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
1209 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00001210 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
1211 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
1212 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00001213
1214- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
1215 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00001216
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00001217- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
1218 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
1219 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
1220 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00001221
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00001222- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
1223 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
1224 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
1225 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
1226 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
1227
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001228- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00001229
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00001230- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
1231
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00001232- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
1233 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
1234 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
1235 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
1236 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
1237 identical to None.
1238
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00001239- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
1240 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
1241 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
1242 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
1243 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
1244 results now.
1245
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00001246- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
1247 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
1248
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00001249- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
1250 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
1251 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
1252 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
1253 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
1254 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
1255 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
1256 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
1257
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00001258- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
1259
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00001260- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
1261 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
1262
1263- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
1264 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
1265 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
1266 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
1267 and other systems.
1268
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00001269- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
1270 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
1271 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
1272 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 +00001273 work well with these.
1274
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00001275- compileall now supports quiet operation.
1276
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001277- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00001278 connections.
1279
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00001280- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
1281 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
1282 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
1283
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00001284- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
1285 sets
1286
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00001287- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
1288 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
1289 name.
1290
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00001291- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
1292 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
1293 passed in.
1294
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001295- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00001296 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00001297 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
1298 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00001299
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00001300- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
1301
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00001302- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
1303
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00001304- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
1305 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
1306 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
1307
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001308- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
1309 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
1310 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
1311 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00001312 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00001313
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001314- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001315 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001316 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00001317
1318- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
1319 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
1320 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
1321
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001322- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00001323 the value of its expression argument.
1324
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00001325- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
1326 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
1327 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
1328
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00001329- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
1330 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
1331 skipstone browser was included.
1332
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00001333- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
1334 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
1335
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001336Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001337-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001338
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00001339- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
1340 names in addition to accepting file names.
1341
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00001342- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
1343 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
1344 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
1345 still used and useful.)
1346
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00001347- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
1348 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
1349 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
1350 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00001351
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00001352- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
1353 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
1354 the generated binary.
1355
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001356Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001357-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001358
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00001359- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
1360
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001361- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
1362 except in the hands of experts.
1363
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001364- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00001365 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
1366 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
1367 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00001368
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00001369- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
1370 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
1371 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1372 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1373 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1374 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1375 builds.
1376
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001377- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1378 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1379 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1380 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1381 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1382 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1383 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1384 new type.
1385
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001386- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001387
1388 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1389 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1390 positive infinities.
1391
1392 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1393 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1394 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1395 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1396 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1397 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1398 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1399
1400 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1401
1402 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1403
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001404- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1405 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1406 size of the executable.
1407
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001408- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1409 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1410 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1411 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001412
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001413- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1414
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001415- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1416 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1417 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001418
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001419- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1420 well as Unix.
1421
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001422- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1423 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1424 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1425 modules in the README file for details.
1426
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001427C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001428-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001429
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001430- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1431 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001432 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001433 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001434 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001435
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001436- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1437 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1438 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1439 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1440 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1441 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001442 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001443 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1444 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1445 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1446 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1447 aligned.)
1448
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001449- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1450 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1451 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1452
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001453- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1454 level.
1455
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001456- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1457 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1458 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1459 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1460 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1461
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001462- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1463 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1464 code.
1465
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001466- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1467 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1468 adjusting for negative indices.
1469
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001470- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1471 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1472 object.
1473
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001474- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1475 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1476 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1477
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001478- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1479 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001480
1481- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1482
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001483- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1484 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1485 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1486 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1487
1488- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1489
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001490- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001491
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001492- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001493 without going through the buffer API.
1494
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001495- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001496
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001497- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1498 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1499 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1500 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1501
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001502- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1503 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1504
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001505- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001506 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1507
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001508New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001509-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001510
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001511- OpenVMS is now supported.
1512
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001513- AtheOS is now supported.
1514
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001515- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1516
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001517- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1518
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001519Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001520-----
1521
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001522- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1523 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1524 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001525
1526Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001527-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001528
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001529- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1530 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1531 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1532 bugs.
1533 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001534 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001535 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1536 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001537 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001538
1539- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001540 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001541
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001542- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1543 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1544
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001545- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1546 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001547 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001548 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1549
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001550- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1551 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1552 use files" uninstall option).
1553
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001554- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1555
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001556- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1557 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1558
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001559- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1560 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1561 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1562
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001563- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1564 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1565 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1566 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1567 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001568 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1569 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1570 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001571
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001572- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001573 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001574 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1575 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1576 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1577 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1578 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1579 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1580 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1581 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1582 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1583 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1584 work around.
1585
1586- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1587 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1588 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1589 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1590 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1591 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1592 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1593 specified with O_CREAT too).
1594
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001595Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001596----
1597
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001598- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001599
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00001600- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
1601 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
1602 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
1603
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001604- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1605 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1606 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1607
1608- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1609 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1610 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1611 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1612 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1613 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1614 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1615 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001616
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001617- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1618 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1619 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001620
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001621- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1622 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1623 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1624 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1625 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001626
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001627- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1628 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1629 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001630
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001631- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1632 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001633
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001634- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1635 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1636 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1637 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1638 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001639
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001640- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1641 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1642 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1643
1644- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1645 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1646 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001647
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001648- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1649 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1650 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1651 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001652 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001653
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001654- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1655 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001656
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001657- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1658 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001659
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001660- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00001661 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001662 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1663 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001664
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001665
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001666What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001667===============================
1668
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001669*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1670
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001671Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001672--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001673
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001674- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1675 with a custom metaclass.
1676
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001677Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001678-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001679
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001680- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1681 are proxies.
1682
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001683Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001684-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001685
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001686- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1687 very short strings.
1688
1689- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1690 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1691 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1692 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1693 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1694
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001695Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001696-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001697
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001698- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1699 close or delete time).
1700
1701- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1702 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1703
1704- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1705
1706- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001707 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001708
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001709Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001710-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001711
1712Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001713-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001714
1715C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001716-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001717
1718New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001719-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001720
1721Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001722-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001723
1724Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001725-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001726
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001727- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1728
1729- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1730 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1731
1732- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1733 deleted at process exit time.
1734
1735- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1736 in backslash.
1737
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001738Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001739----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001740
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001741- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1742 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1743 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1744
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001745
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001746What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001747===========================
1748
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001749*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1750
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001751Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001752--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001753
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001754- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1755 been extensively updated. See
1756
1757 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1758
1759 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1760
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001761- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1762 deleted!
1763
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001764- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1765 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1766 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1767 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1768 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1769
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001770- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1771
1772 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1773 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1774
1775 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1776 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1777 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1778 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1779 supported anyway.
1780
1781 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1782 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1783
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001784- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1785 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1786 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1787 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1788 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001789
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001790- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1791 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1792 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1793
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001794Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001795-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001796
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001797- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1798 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1799 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1800 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1801 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1802 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001803 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1804 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1805 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1806 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001807
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001808- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1809 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1810 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1811
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001812Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001813-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001814
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001815- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1816
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001817Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001818-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001819
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001820- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1821 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1822 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1823 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1824 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1825 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1826
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001827- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1828
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001829- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1830
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001831- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1832
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001833- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1834 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1835 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1836
1837- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1838
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001839Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001840-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001841
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001842- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1843 off a search on Google.
1844
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001845Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001846-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001847
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001848- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1849 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1850 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1851 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1852 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1853 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1854 other platforms should do likewise.
1855
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001856- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1857 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1858 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1859
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001860C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001861-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001862
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001863- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1864 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1865 producing key-value pairs.
1866
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001867- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001868 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001869 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1870 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1871 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1872 previously went unchallenged.
1873
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001874New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001875-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001876
1877Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001878-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001879
1880Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001881-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001882
1883Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001884----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001885
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001886- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1887 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001888
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001889- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1890 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1891 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1892 home.
1893
1894
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001895What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001896===========================
1897
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001898*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1899
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001900Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001901--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001902
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001903- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1904 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001905
1906 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001907 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001908
1909 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1910 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001911 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001912 This needs to be documented.
1913
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001914- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1915 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1916
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001917- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1918 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1919 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1920
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001921- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1922 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1923
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001924- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1925 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1926 class forbids it).
1927
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001928- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1929 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1930 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1931
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001932- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1933
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001934Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001935-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001936
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001937- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1938 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001939 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001940
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001941- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1942 (like 1 + '').
1943
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001944Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001945-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001946
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001947- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1948 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1949 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1950 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001951 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001952 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1953
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001954- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1955 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1956 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1957 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1958
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001959- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1960 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001961 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1962 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1963 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001964
1965- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1966 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001967
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001968- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1969 bytes on its input.
1970
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001971Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001972-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001973
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001974- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001975 convenience function.
1976
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001977- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1978 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1979 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001980 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1981 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1982 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1983 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1984 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1985 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001986
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001987- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1988 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1989 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1990 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1991
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001992- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1993 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1994 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1995
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001996- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1997 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1998 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1999 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
2000
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002001- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
2002 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002003 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002004 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
2005 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
2006 new -l and -e options.
2007
2008- statcache is now deprecated.
2009
2010- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
2011 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002012 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002013 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
2014 time properly taken into account.
2015
2016- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
2017 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
2018 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
2019 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
2020
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002021Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002022-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002023
2024Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002025-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002026
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002027- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
2028 is built with libdb3 if available.
2029
2030- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
2031
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002032C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002033-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002034
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00002035- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
2036 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
2037 PySequence_Size().
2038
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002039- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
2040
2041- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
2042 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
2043 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
2044
2045- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
2046 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
2047
2048- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
2049 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
2050
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002051New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002052-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002053
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00002054- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
2055 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
2056
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00002057- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
2058 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
2059
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002060- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
2061
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002062Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002063-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002064
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00002065- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
2066 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
2067
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002068Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002069-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002070
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002071Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002072----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00002073
2074- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
2075 removed completely in the next release.
2076
2077- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
2078 OSX.
2079
2080- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
2081 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
2082
2083- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
2084
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002085
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002086What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002087===========================
2088
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002089*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
2090
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002091Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002092--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002093
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002094- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002095 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002096 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002097 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
2098 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00002099 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
2100 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00002101 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
2102 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00002103
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00002104- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
2105 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
2106
2107- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
2108 class methods, static methods, and properties.
2109
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002110Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002111-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002112
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00002113- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
2114 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
2115 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
2116 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
2117 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
2118 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
2119 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
2120 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
2121
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002122- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
2123 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
2124 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
2125 example).
2126
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002127- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002128 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002129 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002130 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00002131
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002132- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
2133 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
2134 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00002135 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002136
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002137- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
2138 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
2139 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
2140 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
2141 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
2142 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
2143
2144 isinstance(x, (A, B))
2145
2146 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
2147
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002148Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002149-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002150
2151- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
2152
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002153- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
2154
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002155- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
2156 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00002157
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00002158- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
2159 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
2160 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
2161 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
2162 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
2163 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00002164 attributes.
2165
2166- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
2167 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
2168 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00002169
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002170- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
2171 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
2172 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002173
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002174- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
2175 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
2176 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002177 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
2178 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
2179
2180- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
2181 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00002182
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00002183Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002184-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002185
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00002186- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
2187 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
2188
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002189- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
2190 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
2191 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
2192 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
2193
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00002194- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
2195 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
2196 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
2197 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
2198
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00002199 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
2200 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
2201 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
2202 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
2203 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
2204 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
2205 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
2206 without losing information).
2207
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002208- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002209 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
2210 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
2211 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
2212 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
2213 module).
2214
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002215 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00002216 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
2217 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
2218 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
2219 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00002220
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00002221- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00002222 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
2223 encoding.
2224
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00002225- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
2226 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
2227
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002228- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002229 to allow saving the message body to a file.
2230
2231- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
2232 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
2233 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
2234 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
2235
2236- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
2237
2238- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
2239 ON, and OFF.
2240
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00002241- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
2242 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
2243
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002244Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002245-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00002246
2247- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
2248 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
2249 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002250
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002251- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
2252 been added: -X and -E.
2253
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002254Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002255-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002256
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00002257- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
2258 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
2259
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002260C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002261-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002262
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00002263- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
2264 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
2265 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
2266 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
2267 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
2268
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00002269- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
2270 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
2271 as long) arguments.
2272
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00002273- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
2274 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
2275 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
2276 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
2277 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
2278 report any bugs or strange behavior).
2279
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00002280- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
2281 input.
2282
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002283New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002284-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002285
2286Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002287-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002288
2289Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002290-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002291
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00002292- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
2293 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
2294 is created for .py and .pyw files.
2295
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002296- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
2297 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
2298 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002299 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002300
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002301 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
2302 # (SIGINT) behavior.
2303 import signal
2304 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002305
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002306 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002307 while 1:
2308 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002309 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002310 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
2311 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
2312 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
2313 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00002314
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00002315
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002316What's New in Python 2.2a4?
2317===========================
2318
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002319*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
2320
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002321Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002322--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002323
2324- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
2325 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
2326 documentation for all operations on list objects.
2327
2328- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
2329 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
2330 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
2331 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
2332 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
2333 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
2334 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002335
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002336- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002337 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00002338 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
2339 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
2340 associate a docstring with a property.
2341
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002342- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
2343 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
2344 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
2345 other built-in object types.
2346
2347- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
2348 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
2349 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
2350 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
2351 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
2352
2353- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
2354 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
2355
2356- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
2357 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002358 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002359 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
2360 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
2361 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
2362 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
2363 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
2364
2365- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
2366 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
2367 class.
2368
2369- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
2370 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
2371 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
2372 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
2373
2374- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
2375 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
2376 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2377 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2378
2379- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2380 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2381
2382- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2383 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2384 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2385 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2386 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002387 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002388 with the same value as s.
2389
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002390- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2391
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002392Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002393----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002394
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002395- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2396
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002397- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2398 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2399 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2400 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2401 objects.
2402
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002403- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2404 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002405 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2406 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2407
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002408- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2409 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2410 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2411
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002412Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002413-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002414
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002415- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2416 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2417 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2418 by the instances.
2419
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002420- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2421 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2422 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2423
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002424- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2425 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2426 before the entire comparison is complete.
2427
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002428- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2429 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2430 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2431
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002432- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2433 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2434 getwriter().
2435
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002436- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2437 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2438
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002439- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002440 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2441 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2442
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002443- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2444 iterable object.
2445
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002446- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2447 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002448
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002449- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2450 authentication.
2451
2452- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2453 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002454
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002455- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002456 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2457 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2458 a sample driver.)
2459
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002460Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002461-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002462
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002463- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2464 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2465 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2466 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2467 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2468 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2469 kernel has large file support.
2470
2471- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2472 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2473 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2474 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2475 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2476
2477- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2478 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2479 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2480
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002481C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002482-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002483
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002484- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2485 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2486
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002487New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002488-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002489
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002490- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2491 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2492
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002493Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002494-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002495
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002496- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2497 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2498 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2499 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2500 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2501
2502- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2503 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2504 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2505 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2506
2507- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2508 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2509
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002510Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002511-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002512
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002513- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002514 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2515 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002516
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002517
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002518What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2519===========================
2520
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002521*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2522
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002523Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002524----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002525
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002526- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2527 big to represent as a C double.
2528
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002529- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2530 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2531 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2532 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2533 restriction).
2534
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002535- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2536 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2537 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2538 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2539 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2540
2541 >>> dir([])
2542 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2543 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2544 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2545 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2546 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2547 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2548 'reverse', 'sort']
2549
2550 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2551
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002552- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002553 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2554 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2555 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2556 OverflowError exception.
2557
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002558- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002559 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002560 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2561 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2562 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2563 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2564 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002565 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002566 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2567 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2568
2569 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2570 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2571 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2572 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002573
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002574- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002575 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2576 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2577 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2578 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2579 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2580 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2581 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2582 once it is created.
2583
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002584- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2585 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2586 (key, value) pairs.
2587
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002588- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002589 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2590 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2591
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002592- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2593 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2594 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2595 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2596 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002597
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002598- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002599 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2600 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2601
2602 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2603
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002604- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002605 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2606
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002607Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002608-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002609
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002610- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002611 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2612 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002613
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002614- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2615 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2616 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2617 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2618 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2619 in this area anymore).
2620
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002621- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2622 threading.Timer.
2623
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002624- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2625 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2626
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002627- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002628 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2629
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002630- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002631 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2632 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2633 converted to Python longs.
2634
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002635- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002636 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2637
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002638- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2639 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2640 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2641
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002642Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002643-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002644
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002645- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2646 division operators as per PEP 238.
2647
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002648Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002649-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002650
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002651- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2652 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2653 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2654 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2655
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002656C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002657-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002658
2659- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002660
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002661- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2662 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002663 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002664
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002665 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2666 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002667 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002668 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002669
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002670- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002671 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2672 module:
2673
2674 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002675
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002676 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2677 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002678
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002679 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2680 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002681
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002682 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2683
2684 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2685
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002686- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002687 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2688 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2689 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002690
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002691New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002692-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002693
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002694- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2695 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2696 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2697 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2698 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002699
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002700Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002701-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002702
2703Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002704-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002705
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002706- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2707 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2708 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2709 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002710 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2711 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2712 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2713 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2714 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002715
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002716- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002717 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2718
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002719
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002720What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2721===========================
2722
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002723*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2724
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002725Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002726-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002727
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002728- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2729 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2730
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002731- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2732 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2733 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002734
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002735- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2736 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2737 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2738 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002739
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002740- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2741
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002742- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002743
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002744Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002745-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002746
2747- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002748 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002749 the module docstring for details.
2750
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002751Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002752-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002753
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002754- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002755 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2756 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2757 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002758
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002759- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2760 Nick Mathewson.
2761
2762Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002763----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002764
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002765- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2766 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2767 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2768 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2769 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2770 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2771 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2772 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2773
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002774- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2775 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2776 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2777 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2778
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002779- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2780 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2781 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2782 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2783 come a long way).
2784
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002785- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2786 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2787 write filters for these warnings).
2788
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002789- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2790 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2791 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2792 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2793 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2794
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002795- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2796 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2797 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2798 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2799 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2800 older distribution.
2801
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002802Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002803-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002804
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002805- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2806 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002807 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002808
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002809- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2810 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2811 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2812
2813- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2814
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002815- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2816
2817- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2818
2819- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2820
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002821- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002822
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002823- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2824
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002825New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002826-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002827
2828C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002829-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002830
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002831- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2832 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2833 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2834 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2835 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2836 against buffer overruns.
2837
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002838- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002839 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2840 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002841 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2842 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2843 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2844
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002845- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2846 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2847 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2848 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2849 deprecated.
2850
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002851Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002852-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002853
2854- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2855 relevant is found.
2856
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002857
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002858What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002859===========================
2860
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002861*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2862
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002863Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002864----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002865
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002866- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2867 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2868 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2869 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2870 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2871 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2872 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2873 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002874 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002875 repaired.
2876
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002877- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002878 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002879 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2880 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2881 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2882 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2883 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2884 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2885 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2886 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2887
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002888- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2889 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2890 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2891 leading BMO character).
2892
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002893- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2894 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2895 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2896
2897 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2898 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2899 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002900
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002901 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2902 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2903 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2904 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2905 for various simple to use conversions.
2906
2907 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2908 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2909
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002910 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2911 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2912 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2913 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2914 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2915 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2916 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2917 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2918 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2919 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2920 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2921 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2922 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2923 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2924 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002925
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002926- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2927 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2928 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002929 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002930 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002931
2932 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002933 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2934 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2935 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2936 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2937 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002938 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2939 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002940
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002941 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2942 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2943 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002944 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002945
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002946- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2947 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2948 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2949 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2950 floating arithmetic,
2951
2952 x = 9007199254740992.0
2953 print long(x)
2954
2955 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2956 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2957 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2958 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2959 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2960 functions are of good quality).
2961
2962 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2963 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2964 algorithms to break.
2965
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002966- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2967 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2968 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2969 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2970 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2971 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2972 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2973 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2974 order.
2975
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002976- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2977 operation along the most common code paths.
2978
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002979- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2980 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2981
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002982- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2983 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2984 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2985 {}.update(UserDict())
2986
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002987- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2988 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2989 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2990 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2991 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2992 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2993 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2994 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2995
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002996- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002997 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002998
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002999 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00003000 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
3001 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00003002 join() method of strings
3003 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003004 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
3005 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003006 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00003007 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00003008
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00003009- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
3010 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
3011
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00003012- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
3013 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
3014
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00003015- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
3016 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
3017 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
3018 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
3019
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003020- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
3021 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003022 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003023 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
3024 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00003025
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00003026- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
3027
3028
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003029Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003030-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003031
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003032- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003033 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00003034 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
3035 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
3036
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00003037- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
3038 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
3039
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00003040- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
3041 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
3042 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
3043 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
3044
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00003045- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
3046 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
3047 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
3048
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00003049- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
3050
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00003051- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
3052
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00003053- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
3054 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
3055 that are still imported into string.py).
3056
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003057- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
3058
3059- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
3060 Now it does.
3061
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003062- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
3063
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003064- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
3065 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
3066 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
3067 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
3068 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00003069 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
3070 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00003071
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00003072- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
3073 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
3074 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
3075 'help(object)'.
3076
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003077Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003078-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003079
3080- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003081 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003082 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
3083 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
3084
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003085- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00003086 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
3087 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003088
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003089C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003090-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00003091
3092- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
3093 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003094
3095----
3096
3097**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**