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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +000015- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
16 functions is now writable.
17
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +000018- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
19 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
20 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
21 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
22
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000023- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
24 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
25 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
26 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
27 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +000028
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +000029- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
30 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
31
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000032Extension modules
33-----------------
34
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +000035- Added socket.socketpair().
36
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000037Library
38-------
39
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +000040- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
41 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
42 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
43 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
44 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
45 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
46 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
47 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
48 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
49 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
50 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
51 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
52 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
53
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000054Tools/Demos
55-----------
56
57Build
58-----
59
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +000060- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
61 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
62
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +000063C API
64-----
65
66Documentation
67-------------
68
69New platforms
70-------------
71
72Tests
73-----
74
75Windows
76-------
77
78Mac
79---
80
81
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000082What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
83=================================
84
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +000085*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000086
87Core and builtins
88-----------------
89
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +000090- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
91 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
92 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
93 sensitive code.
94
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +000095- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
96 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
97 @staticmethod
98 def foo(bar):
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +000099 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000100
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000101- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
102 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
103 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
104 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
105 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
106 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
107 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
108 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
109 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
110 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
111 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
112
113 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
114 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
115 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
116 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
117 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
118 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
119 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
120
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000121- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
122 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
123
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000124- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000125 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000126
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000127- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000128 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000129 which was missing for no apparent reason.
130
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000131- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000132 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
133 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
134
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000135- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
136 types that support garbage collection.
137
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000138- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
139
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000140- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
141 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
142 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
143 Jython.
144
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000145- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
146
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000147- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
148 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
149
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000150- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
151 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
152 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000153
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000154- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
155 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
156 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
157
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000158Extension modules
159-----------------
160
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000161- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
162
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000163Library
164-------
165
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000166- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
167 TIS-620
168
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000169- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
170 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
171 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
172 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
173 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
174 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
175 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
176 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
177 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
178 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
179
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000180- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
181
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000182- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
183 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
184 same as when the argument is omitted).
185 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
186
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000187- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
188
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000189- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
190 schemes are offered.
191
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000192- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
193
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000194- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
195 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
196 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
197
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000198- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
199
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000200- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
201 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
202
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000203- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
204 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
205 when dummy_threading is being used.
206
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000207- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
208 from a tarfile.
209
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000210- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000211 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000212
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000213- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
214 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
215 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
216 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
217
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000218- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
219 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
220
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000221- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
222 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
223 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
224 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
225 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
226 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
227 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
228 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
229 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
230 by some other method in progress).
231
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000232- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
233 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
234 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000235
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000236- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
237
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000238- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
239 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
240 AM Kuchling.
241
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000242- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
243 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
244 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
245
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000246- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
247 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
248 instead of unsigned.
249
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000250- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000251 no longer part of the public API.
252
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000253- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
254 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
255 string methods of the same name).
256
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000257- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
258 SF patch 982681.
259
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000260- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000261 SF patch 945642.
262
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000263- doctest unittest integration improvements:
264
265 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
266
267 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
268 DocTestSuites.
269
270- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
271 that provide thread-local data.
272
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000273- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
274 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
275
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000276- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
277
278- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
279 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
280 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
281
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000282- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
283
284 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
285 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
286 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000287
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000288 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
289 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
290 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
291 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
292
293 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
294 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
295
296 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
297 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
298 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
299 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
300
301 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
302 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
303 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
304 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
305 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
306
307 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
308 wrapping help output.
309
310 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
311 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
312 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000313
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000314C API
315-----
316
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000317- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
318 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
319 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
320 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
321 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
322 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
323 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
324 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
325 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
326 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
327 its visible semantics have not changed.
328
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000329- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
330 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
331
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000332Documentation
333-------------
334
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000335- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000336
337 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000338 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000339
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000340 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000341
342 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
343
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000344- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000345
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000346Tests
347-----
348
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000349- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000350 platforms that use the Makefile.
351
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000352- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
353 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
354 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
355
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000356
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000357What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
358=================================
359
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000360*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000361
362Core and builtins
363-----------------
364
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000365- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
366 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
367 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
368 objects now (one object instead of three).
369
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000370- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
371 Windows DLLs.
372
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000373- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
374 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000375
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000376- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
377 a new .pyc magic.
378
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000379- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
380 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
381 be there.
382
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000383- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
384 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
385 the LC_NUMERIC category.
386
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000387- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
388 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
389 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
390
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000391- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
392
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000393- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
394 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
395 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000396
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000397- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
398 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
399
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000400- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
401
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000402- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000403 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000404
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000405- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
406
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000407- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
408
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000409- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
410 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
411
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000412- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
413 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
414 Fixes bug #858016 .
415
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000416- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
417 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
418 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
419
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000420- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
421 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
422 improves their performance (about 35%).
423
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000424- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
425 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
426 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
427
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000428- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
429 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
430 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
431 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
432
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000433- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
434 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
435 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
436 length is not known).
437
438- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
439 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000440 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
441 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000442 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
443
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000444- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
445 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
446
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000447- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
448 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
449 keyword arguments.
450
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000451- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
452 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
453 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
454
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000455- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
456 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
457 cases.
458
459- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
460 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
461 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
462 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
463 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
464 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
465 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
466 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
467 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
468 a release build.
469
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000470- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
471 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
472
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000473- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000474 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000475
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000476- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
477 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
478 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
479 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
480 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
481 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
482 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
483 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
484 destroyed.
485
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000486- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
487 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
488 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
489 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
490 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
491 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
492 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
493 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
494
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000495- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
496 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
497 character other than a space.
498
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000499- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
500 by the function object or by the method object, the function
501 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
502 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
503 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
504 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
505 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
506 attributes with the same name.
507
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000508- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
509 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
510 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
511 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
512 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
513 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
514 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
515 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
516 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
517 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
518 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
519 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
520 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
521 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000522
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000523- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
524 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
525 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
526 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
527 This has been repaired.
528
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000529- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
530
531- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
532
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000533- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
534 over a sequence.
535
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000536- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000537 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000538
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000539- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
540
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000541- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
542 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
543 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
544 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
545 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
546 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
547 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
548 records with equal keys is unchanged).
549
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000550- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
551 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
552 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
553
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000554- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
555 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
556 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
557 freelist.
558
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000559- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
560 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
561
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000562- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
563 number.
564
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000565- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
566 a TypeError exception.
567
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000568- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
569 820195.
570
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000571- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
572 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
573 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
574
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000575- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000576 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
577 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000578
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000579- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
580 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
581 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
582
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000583- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
584 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000585 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000586
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000587- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000588 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
589 the first call.
590
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000591
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000592Extension modules
593-----------------
594
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000595- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
596 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
597
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000598- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
599 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
600 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
601 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
602 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
603 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
604 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000605
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000606- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
607
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000608- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
609
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000610- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
611 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
612
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000613- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
614 fewer false positives.
615
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000616- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
617 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
618
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000619- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000620 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
621
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000622- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000623 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000624 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
625 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
626 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000627
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000628- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
629 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
630 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
631 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
632
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000633- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
634 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
635 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
636 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
637 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
638 #897625.
639
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000640- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
641 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
642
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000643- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
644 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
645 and pops on either side of the deque.
646
647- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
648 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
649
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000650- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
651 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
652 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
653 other functions that expect a function argument.
654
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000655- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
656
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000657- os.getsid was added.
658
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000659- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
660 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
661 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
662
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000663- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
664
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000665- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
666
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000667- readline.clear_history was added.
668
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000669- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
670
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000671- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
672
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000673- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
674
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000675- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
676
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000677- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
678
679- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
680
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000681- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
682
683- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
684
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000685- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
686 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
687 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
688
689- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
690 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
691 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
692 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
693 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
694 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
695 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
696
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000697- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
698 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
699 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
700 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000701
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000702- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000703 iterators from a single iterable.
704
705- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
706 of raising a TypeError exception.
707
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000708- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
709 as parameter.
710
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000711Library
712-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000713
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000714- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
715 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
716 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000717
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000718- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
719 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
720 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000721
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000722- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000723
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000724- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
725 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000726
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000727- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
728 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
729
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000730- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
731
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000732- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000733 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000734
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000735- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
736 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
737
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000738- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
739
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000740- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
741 on cygwin and mingw32.
742
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000743- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
744
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000745- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
746 module.
747
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000748- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
749 installation scheme for all platforms.
750
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000751- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000752 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000753
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000754- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
755 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
756 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
757
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000758- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
759 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
760 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
761
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000762- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
763
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000764- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
765
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000766- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
767 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
768
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000769- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
770 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
771 type pattern with the same value exists.
772
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000773- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
774 when run from the command prompt).
775
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000776- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
777 not taken into consideration when caching value.
778
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000779- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
780 default sort).
781
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000782- Added global runctx function to profile module
783
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000784- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
785
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000786- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
787
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000788- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
789
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000790- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000791 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
792 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
793 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
794 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
795 accordingly.
796
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000797- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
798 decoding standards.
799
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000800- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
801 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
802 called for all requests.
803
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000804- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
805 they are passed to the compiler.
806
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000807- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
808 indent, width and depth.
809
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000810- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
811 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
812
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000813- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
814 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
815
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000816- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
817
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000818- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
819
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000820- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
821
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000822- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
823 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
824
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000825- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000826 for better performance.
827
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000828- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000829
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000830- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
831 a string).
832
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000833- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
834
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000835- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
836
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000837- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
838
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000839- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
840
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000841- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
842 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
843 list of fieldnames.
844
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000845- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
846 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
847
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000848- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
849
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000850- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
851 empty lists.
852
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000853- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
854 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
855 and shelves.
856
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000857- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
858 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
859
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000860- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000861 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
862 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000863
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000864- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
865 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000866 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000867
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000868- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000869 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
870 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
871
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000872- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
873 and removed in Py2.4.
874
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000875- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
876
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000877- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
878
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000879Tools/Demos
880-----------
881
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000882- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
883 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
884
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000885- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
886
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000887- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
888 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
889 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
890 destination in situations where both files are given.
891
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000892- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
893 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
894 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
895 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
896
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000897- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
898
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000899- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
900 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
901 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
902 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
903 now.
904
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000905- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
906 in effect
907
908- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
909 C-c C-h
910
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000911- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
912 -d option was given.
913
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000914Build
915-----
916
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000917- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
918 build under OS X.
919
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000920- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
921 --enable-profiling.
922
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000923- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
924 is configured --with-tsc.
925
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000926- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
927 on AMD64.
928
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000929- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
930 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
931
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000932- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
933 removed.
934
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000935- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
936 supported (see PEP 11).
937
938- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
939
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000940- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
941
942- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
943 (see PEP 11).
944
945- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
946 sizeof(char) must be 1.
947
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000948C API
949-----
950
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000951- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
952 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
953 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
954
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000955- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
956 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
957 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
958 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
959
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000960- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
961 generator objects.
962
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000963- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
964 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000965 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
966 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000967
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000968- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
969 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
970
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000971- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
972 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
973 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
974 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
975 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
976
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000977- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
978 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
979 about 10% faster.
980
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000981- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
982 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
983
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000984- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
985 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
986 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
987 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
988
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000989Windows
990-------
991
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000992- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
993 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
994 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
995 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
996
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000997- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
998 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
999 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1000
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001001
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001002What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1003===============================
1004
1005*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1006
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001007IDLE
1008----
1009
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001010- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1011 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1012 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1013 context-menu actions.
1014
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001015- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1016 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1017 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1018 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1019 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1020 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1021 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1022 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1023 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1024
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001025
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001026What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1027=============================================
1028
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001029*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001030
1031Core and builtins
1032-----------------
1033
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001034- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001035 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001036 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1037
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001038Extension modules
1039-----------------
1040
1041- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1042 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1043 than once. This has been fixed.
1044
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001045- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1046 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1047 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1048 call.
1049
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001050- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1051
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001052Library
1053-------
1054
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001055- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1056 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1057
1058- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1059 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1060 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1061 restored.
1062
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001063IDLE
1064----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001065
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001066- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001067
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001068Build
1069-----
1070
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001071- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1072 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1073
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001074C API
1075-----
1076
1077Windows
1078-------
1079
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001080- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1081 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1082
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001083- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1084
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001085Mac
1086---
1087
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001088- Various fixes to pimp.
1089
1090- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1091
1092- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1093 more problems than it solves.
1094
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001095
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001096What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1097=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001098
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001099*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1100
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001101Core and builtins
1102-----------------
1103
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001104- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1105 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1106
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001107- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1108 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001109 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001110
1111- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1112 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1113 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001114 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001115
1116- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1117 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001118
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001119- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1120 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1121 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1122
1123- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001124 770247.
1125
1126- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001127
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001128Extension modules
1129-----------------
1130
1131- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1132 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1133
1134- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1135
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001136- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1137
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001138- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1139 contained within the _strptime module.
1140
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001141- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1142 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1143
1144- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001145 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1146
1147- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1148 the find_class attribute, if present.
1149
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001150- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001151
1152 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1153 (SF bug 763298).
1154
1155 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001156 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1157 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1158 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001159
1160 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1161
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001162Library
1163-------
1164
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001165- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1166
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001167- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1168 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1169 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1170 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1171 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1172 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1173 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1174 or Tester().
1175
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001176- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1177 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1178 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1179 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1180 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1181 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1182 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1183 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1184 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001185
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001186 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001187
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001188- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1189 weren't before was an oversight.
1190
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001191- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1192 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1193
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001194- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1195 when there are no lines.
1196
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001197- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1198 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1199
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001200- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1201 to child processes.
1202
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001203- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1204
1205- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1206
1207- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1208 xmlrpclib.
1209
1210- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1211 responses.
1212
1213- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1214 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1215
1216- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1217 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1218 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1219
1220- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1221 used as patterns.
1222
1223- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1224 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1225 than Tk 8.3.
1226
1227- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1228
1229- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001230
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001231Tools/Demos
1232-----------
1233
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001234- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1235
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001236- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1237
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001238- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001239
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001240Build
1241-----
1242
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001243- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1244
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001245- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1246
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001247- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1248 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001249
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001250- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1251 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1252 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001253
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001254C API
1255-----
1256
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001257- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1258 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1259
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001260Windows
1261-------
1262
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001263- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1264 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1265 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1266 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1267 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1268 Python exception ::
1269
1270 thread.error: can't start new thread
1271
1272 is raised now.
1273
1274- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1275 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1276 instead of from DLL teardown.
1277
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001278Mac
1279---
1280
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001281- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001282 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001283 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1284 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1285 the executable in the bundle.
1286
1287- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001288
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001289- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1290
1291- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1292 on Panther.
1293
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001294What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1295================================
1296
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001297*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001298
1299Core and builtins
1300-----------------
1301
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001302- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1303 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1304 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1305 with the -i option.
1306
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001307- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1308 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1309
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001310- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1311 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1312
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001313- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1314 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1315 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1316 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1317 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1318 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1319 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1320 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1321 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1322 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1323 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1324 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1325 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001326
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001327- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1328 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1329 embedded in a lambda expression.
1330
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001331- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1332 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1333 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1334 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1335 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1336
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001337- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1338 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1339 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1340
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001341- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1342 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1343
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001344- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1345 It's writable again.
1346
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001347- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1348 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1349 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001350 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001351
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001352- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1353 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1354 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1355
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001356Extension modules
1357-----------------
1358
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001359- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1360 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1361
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001362- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1363 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1364 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1365 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1366
1367- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1368 collection.
1369
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001370- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1371 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1372 unique within a single program run.
1373
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001374- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1375 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1376
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001377- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1378 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1379
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001380- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1381 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001382
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001383- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1384
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001385- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1386 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1387
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001388- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1389 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1390 for many BSD-derived systems.
1391
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001392
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001393Library
1394-------
1395
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001396- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1397 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1398 primary ones:
1399
1400 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1401 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1402 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1403
1404 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1405 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1406 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1407 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1408 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1409 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1410
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001411- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1412 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1413 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1414 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1415 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1416 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1417 argument.
1418
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001419- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1420 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1421 in the archive.
1422
1423- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1424 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1425
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001426- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1427 569574).
1428
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001429- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1430 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1431 no more.
1432
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001433- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1434 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1435 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1436 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1437 code coverage.
1438
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001439- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1440 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1441 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001442 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1443 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001444
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001445- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1446 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1447 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001448 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001449
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001450- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1451
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001452- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1453 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1454 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1455 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1456
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001457- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1458 handling.
1459
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001460- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1461 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1462
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001463- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1464 in socket.py.
1465
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001466- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1467
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001468- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1469 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1470 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1471 opener with proxy support.
1472
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001473- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1474
1475- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1476
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001477Tools/Demos
1478-----------
1479
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001480- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1481
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001482- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1483
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001484- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1485 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001486
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001487- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1488 files.
1489
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001490Build
1491-----
1492
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001493- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001494 different root directory.
1495
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001496C API
1497-----
1498
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001499- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1500 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1501 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1502 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1503 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1504 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1505 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1506 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1507 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1508 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1509
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001510- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1511 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1512 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1513 from Python.
1514
1515
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001516New platforms
1517-------------
1518
1519None this time.
1520
1521Tests
1522-----
1523
1524- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1525 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1526
1527Windows
1528-------
1529
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001530- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1531
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001532- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1533 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1534 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1535 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1536 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1537 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1538 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1539 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1540 that's what it's for.
1541
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001542Mac
1543---
1544
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001545- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1546 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1547 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1548 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001549- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1550 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1551- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001552
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001553SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1554------------------------------------
1555
1556430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1557598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1558622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1559661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1560683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1561697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1562713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1563724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1564727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1565729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1566730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1567731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1568732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1569733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1570735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1571740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1572744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1573745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1574747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1575749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1576751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1577753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1578755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1579757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1580760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1581
1582
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001583What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1584================================
1585
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001586*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001587
1588Core and builtins
1589-----------------
1590
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001591- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1592 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1593
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001594- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1595 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1596 and cannot be strings).
1597
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001598- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1599 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1600 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1601 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1602
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001603- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1604 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1605 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1606 Python itself.
1607
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001608- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1609 the referenced object, if it has one.
1610
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001611- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1612 the thread started at
1613 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1614
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001615- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1616 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1617 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1618 placed on a list index.
1619
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001620- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1621 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1622 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1623 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1624
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001625- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1626 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1627 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1628 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1629 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1630 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1631 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1632
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001633- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1634 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1635 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1636 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1637 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1638
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001639- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1640 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001641
1642- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1643 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1644 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1645 #693195.)
1646
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001647- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1648 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001649
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001650- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001651 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001652 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1653 interpreter executions, would fail.
1654
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001655- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001656 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001657 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001658
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001659Extension modules
1660-----------------
1661
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001662- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1663 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1664 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1665 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1666
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001667- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1668 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1669
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001670- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1671 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1672 and Greg Chapman.)
1673
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001674- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1675 recursively.
1676
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001677- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001678 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1679 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1680 leaks.
1681
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001682- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1683
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001684- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1685 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1686 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1687 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1688 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1689 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1690 #705836.
1691
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001692- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001693 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1694
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001695- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1696 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1697 See SF bug #692416.
1698
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001699- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1700 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1701
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001702- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1703 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1704 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001705
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001706- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001707 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1708 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1709
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001710- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1711 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1712 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1713 timeouts to work properly.
1714
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001715Library
1716-------
1717
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001718- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1719 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1720 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1721 future release.
1722
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001723- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1724 for querying platform dependent features.
1725
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001726- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001727
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001728- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1729 pickle protocol versions.
1730
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001731- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1732 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1733 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1734
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001735- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1736
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001737- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1738 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1739 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1740 modules.
1741
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001742- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1743 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1744 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1745
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001746- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1747 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1748
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001749- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1750 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1751 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1752
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001753- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001754 MS Office extensions.
1755
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001756- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1757 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1758
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001759- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1760 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1761
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001762- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1763 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1764 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1765 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1766 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1767 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1768
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001769- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1770 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1771 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001772
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001773- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1774 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1775 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1776
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001777- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1778
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001779- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1780 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1781 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1782
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001783Tools/Demos
1784-----------
1785
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001786- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1787 See the module docstring for details.
1788
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001789Build
1790-----
1791
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001792- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1793 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001794
1795C API
1796-----
1797
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001798- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1799
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001800- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1801 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1802 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1803
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001804- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1805 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001806
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001807 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1808 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1809 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001810
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001811- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001812 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1813
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001814- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1815 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1816 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001817
1818New platforms
1819-------------
1820
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001821None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001822
1823Tests
1824-----
1825
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001826- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1827 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001828
1829Windows
1830-------
1831
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001832- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1833 function.
1834
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001835- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1836 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001837
1838Mac
1839---
1840
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001841- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1842 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001843
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001844- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1845 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001846
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001847- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1848 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1849 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001850
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001851- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001852 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1853 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001854
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001855- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1856 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001857
1858
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001859What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1860=================================
1861
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001862*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001863
1864Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001865-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001866
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001867- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1868 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1869 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1870
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001871- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1872 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1873 (SF patch #664376.)
1874
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001875- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1876 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1877 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1878 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1879 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1880 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001881 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001882
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001883- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1884 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1885 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1886 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001887 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001888
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001889- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1890 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1891 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1892 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1893 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1894 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1895 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1896 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1897 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1898 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1899 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1900
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001901- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1902 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1903 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1904 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1905 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1906 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1907
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001908- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1909 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1910
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001911- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1912 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1913 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1914 case.)
1915
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001916- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1917 passed as unicode strings.
1918
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001919- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1920 See SF bug #683467.
1921
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001922- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1923 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1924
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001925- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1926
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001927- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1928
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001929- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1930 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1931 arguments.
1932
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001933- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1934 See SF bug #667147.
1935
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001936- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001937 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001938 See SF bug #676155.
1939
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001940- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001941 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001942 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1943 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1944 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1945 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1946 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1947 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001948
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001949Extension modules
1950-----------------
1951
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001952- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1953 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1954 tp_as_number pointer.
1955
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001956- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1957 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1958 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1959 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1960 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1961
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001962- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1963
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001964- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1965
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001966- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001967 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001968 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1969 patch #678531.)
1970
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001971- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1972 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1973
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001974- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1975 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1976
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001977- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1978
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001979- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1980 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1981 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1982
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001983- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1984
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001985- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1986 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1987
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001988- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001989
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001990- datetime changes:
1991
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001992 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1993
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001994 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1995 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1996 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1997 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1998 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1999 now.
2000
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002001 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002002 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2003 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002004
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002005 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002006 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002007 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2008 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2009 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2010 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002011
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002012 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2013 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2014 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002015 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2016
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002017 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2018 by a later example coded by Guido.
2019
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002020 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002021 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2022 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2023 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002024 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2025 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2026
2027 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2028 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2029 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2030 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2031 tzinfo subclass instance.
2032
2033 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2034 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2035 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2036 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2037 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2038 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2039 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2040 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002041
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002042 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2043 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2044 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2045 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2046 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002047 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2048
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002049 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002050
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002051 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2052 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2053 as a naive datetime object.
2054
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002055 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2056 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2057 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2058
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002059 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2060 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2061 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2062 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2063 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2064 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2065 comparison.
2066
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002067 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2068 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2069 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2070 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002071 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002072
2073 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002074
2075 and ::
2076
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002077 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2078
2079 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2080 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2081 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2082 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2083
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002084 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2085 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2086 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2087 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2088 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2089
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002090 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2091 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002092 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2093 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002094
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002095Library
2096-------
2097
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002098- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2099 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2100
2101- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2102 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2103 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2104 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2105 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2106 See PEP 307 for details.
2107
2108- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2109 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2110
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002111- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2112 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002113 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002114 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2115 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002116 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002117
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002118- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2119 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2120
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002121- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2122 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2123 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2124
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002125- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2126
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002127- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2128 exception.
2129
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002130- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2131 class.
2132
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002133- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2134 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2135 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2136
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002137- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2138 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2139
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002140- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002141 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2142 See SF bug #659228.
2143
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002144- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2145 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2146 See SF patch #651082.
2147
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002148- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002149
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002150- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2151 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2152
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002153- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002154 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002155
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002156- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2157 DOS paths from other platforms.
2158
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002159Tools/Demos
2160-----------
2161
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002162- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2163 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2164 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2165 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2166 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2167 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2168 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2169 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2170 example:
2171
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002172 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2173 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002174
2175 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2176
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002177
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002178Build
2179-----
2180
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002181- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2182 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2183 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002184 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2185
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002186 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2187
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002188- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2189 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2190 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2191 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2192 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2193 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2194 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2195 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2196 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2197
2198- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2199 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2200 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2201 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2202
2203- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2204 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2205
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002206C API
2207-----
2208
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002209- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2210 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002211
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002212- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2213 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2214 tp_as_number pointer.
2215
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002216- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2217 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2218 (SF #681367)
2219
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002220- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2221 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2222 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2223 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002224
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002225Tests
2226-----
2227
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002228- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002229 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2230 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2231 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2232 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2233 pydoc.)
2234
2235- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2236
2237- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002238
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002239Windows
2240-------
2241
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002242- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2243 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2244 time).
2245
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002246- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2247 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2248
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002249- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2250 release without strong cryptography.
2251
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002252- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002253 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002254
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002255- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2256 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2257
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002258Mac
2259---
2260
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002261- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2262 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002263
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002264- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2265 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2266 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002267
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002268- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2269 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002270
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002271- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2272 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2273 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2274 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002275
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002276- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002277 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2278 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2279 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002280
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002281
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002282What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002283=================================
2284
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002285*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002286
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002287Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002288--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002289
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002290- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2291
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002292- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2293 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002294 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002295 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002296 a different meaning than before.
2297
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002298- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002299 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002300 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002301
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002302- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002303 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002304 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002305
2306- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2307 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2308 and deallocation.
2309
2310- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2311 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2312
2313- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2314 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2315 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2316 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2317 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2318
2319- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2320 now detected by the garbage collector.
2321
2322- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2323 [SF bug 519621]
2324
2325- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2326 identifier.
2327
2328- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2329 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2330 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2331 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2332 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2333 [SF bug 563060]
2334
2335- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2336 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2337 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2338 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2339 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2340
2341- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2342 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2343 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2344
2345- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2346
2347- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2348 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2349 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2350 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2351 state of the slots would be lost.)
2352
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002353Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002354-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002355
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002356- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002357 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2358 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2359 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2360 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002361 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2362 Jython 2.1.
2363
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002364- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002365 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002366 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2367 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2368 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2369 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2370 these, see PEP 302.
2371
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002372- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2373 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2374 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2375
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002376- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2377 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2378 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2379
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002380- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2381 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2382 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2383
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002384- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2385 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2386 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2387 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2388 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2389 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2390 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2391 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2392 releases or implementations.
2393
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002394- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002395 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2396 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002397
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002398- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2399 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2400
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002401- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2402 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2403 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2404
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002405- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2406 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2407
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002408- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2409 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002410 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2411 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002412
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002413- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2414 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2415 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2416 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2417 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2418
2419 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2420 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2421 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2422 pattern.
2423
2424 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2425 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2426 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2427 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2428
2429 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2430 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2431 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2432 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2433 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2434 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2435
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002436- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2437 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2438 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2439 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2440 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2441 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2442 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2443 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002444
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002445- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2446 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2447 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2448 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2449 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002450 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2451 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2452 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2453 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2454 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2455 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2456 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002457
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002458- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2459 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2460
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002461- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2462 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2463 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2464 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2465 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2466 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2467 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2468 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2469 to Zack Weinberg!
2470
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002471- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2472 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2473 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2474 type. This has been fixed now.
2475
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002476- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2477 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2478 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2479
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002480- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2481 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2482 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2483 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2484 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2485 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2486 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2487 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002488 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002489
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002490- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2491 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2492 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002493
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002494- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2495 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2496 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2497 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2498 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2499 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2500 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2501 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002502 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002503 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2504 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2505
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002506- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2507 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2508 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2509 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2510 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2511 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2512 this.)
2513
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002514- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2515 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002516 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002517 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002518 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2519 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002520 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2521 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002522
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002523- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2524 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2525 currently running.
2526
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002527- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2528 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2529 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2530 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2531
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002532- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2533 as directory names.
2534
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002535- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2536 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2537
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002538- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2539 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2540
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002541- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002542 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2543 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002544
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002545- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2546 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2547 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2548 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2549 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2550
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002551- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2552 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2553 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2554 removed.
2555
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002556- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2557 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2558 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2559
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002560- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2561 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2562 to __debug__.
2563
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002564- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2565 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2566 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2567
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002568- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2569 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2570 deprecated now.
2571
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002572- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2573 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2574 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002575
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002576- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2577 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2578 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2579 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2580 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002581
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002582- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2583 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2584
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002585- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2586 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2587 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002588 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002589 is backward compatible.
2590
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002591- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2592 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2593 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2594 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2595 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2596
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002597- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2598 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2599 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2600 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2601 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2602 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002603
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002604- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2605 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2606
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002607- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2608 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2609
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002610- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2611 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2612 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2613 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2614 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2615
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002616- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2617 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2618 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2619
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002620- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002621 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2622
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002623- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2624 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2625 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002626
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002627- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2628 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2629
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002630- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2631 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2632 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2633
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002634- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2635
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002636Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002637-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002638
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002639- Added three operators to the operator module:
2640 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2641 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2642 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2643
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002644- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2645
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002646- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2647 archives.
2648
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002649- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2650 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2651 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2652
2653 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2654
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002655- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2656 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2657 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002658 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002659
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002660- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2661 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2662 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2663 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002664 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2665 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2666 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2667 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002668
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002669- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2670 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002671
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002672- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2673
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002674- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2675 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2676
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002677- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2678 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2679 supported.
2680
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002681- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2682
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002683- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2684 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002685
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002686- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2687 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2688
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002689- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2690
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002691- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2692 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2693
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002694- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2695 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2696 functions but callable type objects.
2697
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002698- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002699 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002700 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002701
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002702- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2703 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002704
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002705- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2706 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002707
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002708- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2709 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2710 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2711 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2712
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002713- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2714 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002715
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002716- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2717 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2718 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2719 and __imul__.
2720
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002721- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002722 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2723 is called.
2724
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002725- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2726 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2727 interpreter was compiled.
2728
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002729- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2730 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2731 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002732 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002733 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2734 1, not 2.
2735
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002736- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2737 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2738 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2739 limit.
2740
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002741- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2742 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2743 bug #623464.
2744
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002745- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2746 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2747 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2748 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2749
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002750Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002751-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002752
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002753- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2754
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002755- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2756 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2757 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2758 with Python 2.3a2.
2759
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002760- os.path exposes getctime.
2761
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002762- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002763 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002764 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002765 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002766 unit tests of floating point results.
2767
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002768- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2769 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2770 has been increased.
2771
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002772- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2773 executed.
2774
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002775- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2776 postinstallation script.
2777
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002778- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2779 test the current module.
2780
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002781- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002782 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2783 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2784 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2785 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2786
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002787- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002788 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002789 Ward's Optik package.
2790
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002791- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2792 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2793 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2794 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2795
2796- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2797 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002798 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002799
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002800- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2801 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2802 shelf are binary pickles.
2803
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002804- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2805 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2806
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002807- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2808 modules are iterators now.
2809
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002810- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2811 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2812 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2813 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2814 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2815 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002816
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002817- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2818 with their entity value.
2819
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002820- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2821
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002822- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2823 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002824
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002825- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2826 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002827 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002828
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002829- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2830 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2831 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2832 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2833 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2834 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2835 main():
2836
2837 import locale
2838 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2839
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002840- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2841 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2842
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002843- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2844 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2845 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2846 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2847 to the new standard.
2848
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002849- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2850 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2851 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2852 an extension to the database.
2853
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002854- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2855 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2856 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2857 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002858 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002859
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002860- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002861 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002862
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002863- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2864 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2865 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2866 bounded integers.
2867
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002868- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2869 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2870 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2871 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2872 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2873 in existence.
2874
2875 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2876 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2877 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2878 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2879 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2880 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2881
2882 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2883 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2884 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2885 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2886
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002887- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2888 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2889 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2890
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002891- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2892
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002893- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2894 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2895 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2896 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2897
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002898- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2899 argument.
2900
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002901- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2902 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2903 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2904 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2905 [SF patch 560794].
2906
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002907- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2908 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2909 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002910 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2911 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2912 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002913
2914- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2915 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002916
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002917- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2918 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2919 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2920 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002921
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002922- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2923 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2924 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2925 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2926 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2927
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002928- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002929
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002930- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2931
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002932- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2933 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2934 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2935 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2936 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2937 identical to None.
2938
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002939- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2940 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2941 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2942 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2943 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2944 results now.
2945
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002946- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2947 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2948
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002949- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2950 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2951 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2952 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2953 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2954 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2955 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2956 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2957
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002958- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2959
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002960- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2961 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2962
2963- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2964 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2965 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2966 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2967 and other systems.
2968
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002969- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2970 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2971 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2972 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 +00002973 work well with these.
2974
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002975- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2976
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002977- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002978 connections.
2979
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002980- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2981 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2982 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2983
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002984- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2985 sets
2986
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002987- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2988 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2989 name.
2990
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002991- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2992 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2993 passed in.
2994
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002995- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002996 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002997 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2998 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002999
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003000- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3001
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003002- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3003
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003004- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3005 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3006 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3007
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003008- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3009 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3010 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3011 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003012 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003013
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003014- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003015 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003016 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003017
3018- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3019 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3020 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3021
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003022- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003023 the value of its expression argument.
3024
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003025- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3026 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3027 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3028
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003029- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3030 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3031 skipstone browser was included.
3032
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003033- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3034 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3035
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003036Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003037-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003038
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003039- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3040 names in addition to accepting file names.
3041
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003042- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3043 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3044 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3045 still used and useful.)
3046
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003047- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3048 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3049 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3050 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003051
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003052- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3053 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3054 the generated binary.
3055
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003056Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003057-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003058
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003059- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3060
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003061- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3062 except in the hands of experts.
3063
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003064- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003065 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3066 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3067 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003068
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003069- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3070 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3071 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3072 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3073 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3074 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3075 builds.
3076
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003077- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3078 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3079 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3080 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3081 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3082 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3083 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3084 new type.
3085
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003086- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003087
3088 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3089 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3090 positive infinities.
3091
3092 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3093 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3094 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3095 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3096 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3097 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3098 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3099
3100 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3101
3102 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3103
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003104- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3105 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3106 size of the executable.
3107
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003108- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3109 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3110 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3111 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003112
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003113- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3114
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003115- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3116 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3117 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003118
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003119- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3120 well as Unix.
3121
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003122- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3123 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3124 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3125 modules in the README file for details.
3126
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003127C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003128-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003129
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003130- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3131 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003132 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003133 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003134 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003135
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003136- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3137 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3138 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3139 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3140 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3141 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003142 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003143 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3144 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3145 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3146 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3147 aligned.)
3148
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003149- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3150 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3151 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3152
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003153- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3154 level.
3155
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003156- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3157 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3158 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3159 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3160 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3161
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003162- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3163 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3164 code.
3165
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003166- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3167 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3168 adjusting for negative indices.
3169
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003170- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3171 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3172 object.
3173
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003174- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3175 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3176 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3177
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003178- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3179 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003180
3181- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3182
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003183- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3184 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3185 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3186 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3187
3188- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3189
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003190- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003191
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003192- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003193 without going through the buffer API.
3194
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003195- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003196
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003197- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3198 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3199 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3200 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3201
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003202- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3203 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3204
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003205- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003206 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3207
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003208New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003209-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003210
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003211- OpenVMS is now supported.
3212
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003213- AtheOS is now supported.
3214
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003215- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3216
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003217- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3218
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003219Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003220-----
3221
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003222- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3223 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3224 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003225
3226Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003227-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003228
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003229- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3230 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3231 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3232 bugs.
3233 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003234 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003235 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3236 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003237 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003238
3239- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003240 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003241
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003242- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3243 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3244
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003245- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3246 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003247 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003248 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3249
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003250- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3251 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3252 use files" uninstall option).
3253
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003254- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3255
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003256- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3257 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3258
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003259- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3260 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3261 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3262
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003263- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3264 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3265 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3266 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3267 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003268 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3269 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3270 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003271
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003272- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003273 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003274 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3275 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3276 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3277 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3278 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3279 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3280 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3281 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3282 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3283 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3284 work around.
3285
3286- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3287 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3288 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3289 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3290 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3291 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3292 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3293 specified with O_CREAT too).
3294
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003295Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003296----
3297
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003298- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003299
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003300- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3301 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3302 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3303
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003304- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3305 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3306 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3307
3308- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3309 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3310 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3311 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3312 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3313 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3314 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3315 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003316
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003317- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3318 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3319 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003320
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003321- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3322 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3323 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3324 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3325 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003326
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003327- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3328 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3329 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003330
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003331- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3332 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003333
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003334- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3335 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3336 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3337 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3338 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003339
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003340- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3341 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3342 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3343
3344- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3345 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3346 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003347
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003348- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3349 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3350 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3351 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003352 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003353
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003354- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3355 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003356
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003357- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3358 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003359
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003360- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003361 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003362 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3363 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003364
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003365
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003366What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003367===============================
3368
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003369*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3370
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003371Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003372--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003373
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003374- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3375 with a custom metaclass.
3376
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003377Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003378-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003379
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003380- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3381 are proxies.
3382
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003383Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003384-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003385
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003386- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3387 very short strings.
3388
3389- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3390 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3391 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3392 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3393 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3394
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003395Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003396-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003397
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003398- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3399 close or delete time).
3400
3401- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3402 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3403
3404- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3405
3406- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003407 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003408
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003409Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003410-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003411
3412Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003413-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003414
3415C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003416-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003417
3418New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003419-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003420
3421Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003422-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003423
3424Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003425-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003426
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003427- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3428
3429- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3430 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3431
3432- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3433 deleted at process exit time.
3434
3435- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3436 in backslash.
3437
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003438Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003439----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003440
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003441- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3442 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3443 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3444
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003445
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003446What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003447===========================
3448
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003449*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3450
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003451Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003452--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003453
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003454- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3455 been extensively updated. See
3456
3457 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3458
3459 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3460
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003461- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3462 deleted!
3463
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003464- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3465 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3466 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3467 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3468 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3469
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003470- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3471
3472 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3473 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3474
3475 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3476 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3477 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3478 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3479 supported anyway.
3480
3481 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3482 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3483
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003484- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3485 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3486 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3487 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3488 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003489
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003490- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3491 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3492 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3493
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003494Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003495-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003496
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003497- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3498 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3499 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3500 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3501 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3502 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003503 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3504 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3505 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3506 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003507
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003508- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3509 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3510 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3511
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003512Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003513-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003514
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003515- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3516
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003517Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003518-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003519
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003520- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3521 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3522 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3523 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3524 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3525 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3526
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003527- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3528
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003529- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3530
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003531- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3532
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003533- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3534 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3535 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3536
3537- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3538
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003539Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003540-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003541
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003542- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3543 off a search on Google.
3544
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003545Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003546-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003547
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003548- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3549 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3550 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3551 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3552 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3553 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3554 other platforms should do likewise.
3555
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003556- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3557 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3558 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3559
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003560C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003561-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003562
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003563- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3564 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3565 producing key-value pairs.
3566
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003567- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003568 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003569 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3570 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3571 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3572 previously went unchallenged.
3573
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003574New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003575-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003576
3577Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003578-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003579
3580Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003581-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003582
3583Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003584----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003585
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003586- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3587 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003588
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003589- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3590 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3591 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3592 home.
3593
3594
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003595What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003596===========================
3597
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003598*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3599
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003600Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003601--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003602
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003603- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3604 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003605
3606 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003607 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003608
3609 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3610 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003611 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003612 This needs to be documented.
3613
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003614- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3615 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3616
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003617- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3618 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3619 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3620
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003621- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3622 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3623
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003624- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3625 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3626 class forbids it).
3627
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003628- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3629 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3630 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3631
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003632- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3633
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003634Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003635-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003636
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003637- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3638 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003639 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003640
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003641- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3642 (like 1 + '').
3643
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003644Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003645-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003646
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003647- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3648 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3649 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3650 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003651 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003652 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3653
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003654- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3655 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3656 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3657 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3658
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003659- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3660 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003661 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3662 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3663 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003664
3665- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3666 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003667
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003668- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3669 bytes on its input.
3670
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003671Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003672-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003673
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003674- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003675 convenience function.
3676
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003677- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3678 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3679 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003680 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3681 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3682 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3683 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3684 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3685 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003686
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003687- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3688 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3689 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3690 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3691
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003692- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3693 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3694 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3695
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003696- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3697 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3698 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3699 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3700
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003701- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3702 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003703 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003704 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3705 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3706 new -l and -e options.
3707
3708- statcache is now deprecated.
3709
3710- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3711 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003712 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003713 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3714 time properly taken into account.
3715
3716- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3717 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3718 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3719 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3720
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003721Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003722-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003723
3724Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003725-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003726
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003727- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3728 is built with libdb3 if available.
3729
3730- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3731
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003732C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003733-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003734
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003735- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3736 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3737 PySequence_Size().
3738
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003739- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3740
3741- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3742 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3743 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3744
3745- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3746 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3747
3748- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3749 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3750
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003751New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003752-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003753
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003754- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3755 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3756
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003757- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3758 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3759
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003760- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3761
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003762Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003763-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003764
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003765- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3766 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3767
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003768Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003769-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003770
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003771Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003772----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003773
3774- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3775 removed completely in the next release.
3776
3777- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3778 OSX.
3779
3780- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3781 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3782
3783- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3784
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003785
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003786What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003787===========================
3788
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003789*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3790
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003791Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003792--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003793
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003794- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003795 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003796 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003797 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3798 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003799 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3800 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003801 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3802 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003803
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003804- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3805 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3806
3807- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3808 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3809
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003810Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003811-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003812
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003813- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3814 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3815 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3816 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3817 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3818 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3819 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3820 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3821
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003822- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3823 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3824 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3825 example).
3826
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003827- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003828 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003829 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003830 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003831
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003832- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3833 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3834 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003835 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003836
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003837- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3838 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3839 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3840 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3841 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3842 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3843
3844 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3845
3846 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3847
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003848Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003849-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003850
3851- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3852
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003853- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3854
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003855- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3856 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003857
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003858- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3859 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3860 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3861 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3862 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3863 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003864 attributes.
3865
3866- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3867 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3868 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003869
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003870- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3871 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3872 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003873
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003874- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3875 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3876 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003877 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3878 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3879
3880- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3881 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003882
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003883Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003884-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003885
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003886- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3887 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3888
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003889- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3890 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3891 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3892 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3893
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003894- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3895 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3896 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3897 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3898
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003899 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3900 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3901 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3902 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3903 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3904 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3905 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3906 without losing information).
3907
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003908- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003909 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3910 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3911 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3912 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3913 module).
3914
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003915 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003916 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3917 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3918 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3919 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003920
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003921- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003922 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3923 encoding.
3924
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003925- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3926 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3927
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003928- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003929 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3930
3931- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3932 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3933 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3934 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3935
3936- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3937
3938- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3939 ON, and OFF.
3940
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003941- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3942 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3943
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003944Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003945-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003946
3947- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3948 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3949 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003950
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003951- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3952 been added: -X and -E.
3953
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003954Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003955-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003956
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003957- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3958 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3959
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003960C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003961-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003962
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003963- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3964 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3965 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3966 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3967 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3968
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003969- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3970 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3971 as long) arguments.
3972
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003973- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3974 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3975 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3976 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3977 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3978 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3979
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003980- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3981 input.
3982
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003983New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003984-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003985
3986Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003987-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003988
3989Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003990-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003991
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003992- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3993 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3994 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3995
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003996- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3997 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3998 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003999 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004000
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004001 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4002 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4003 import signal
4004 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004005
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004006 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004007 while 1:
4008 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004009 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004010 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4011 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4012 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4013 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004014
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004015
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004016What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4017===========================
4018
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004019*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4020
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004021Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004022--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004023
4024- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4025 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4026 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4027
4028- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4029 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4030 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4031 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4032 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4033 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4034 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004035
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004036- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004037 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004038 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4039 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4040 associate a docstring with a property.
4041
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004042- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4043 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4044 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4045 other built-in object types.
4046
4047- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4048 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4049 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4050 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4051 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4052
4053- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4054 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4055
4056- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4057 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004058 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004059 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4060 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4061 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4062 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4063 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4064
4065- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4066 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4067 class.
4068
4069- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4070 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4071 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4072 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4073
4074- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4075 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4076 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4077 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4078
4079- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4080 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4081
4082- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4083 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4084 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4085 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4086 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004087 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004088 with the same value as s.
4089
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004090- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4091
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004092Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004093----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004094
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004095- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4096
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004097- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4098 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4099 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4100 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4101 objects.
4102
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004103- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4104 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004105 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4106 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4107
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004108- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4109 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4110 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4111
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004112Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004113-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004114
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004115- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4116 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4117 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4118 by the instances.
4119
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004120- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4121 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4122 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4123
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004124- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4125 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4126 before the entire comparison is complete.
4127
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004128- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4129 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4130 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4131
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004132- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4133 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4134 getwriter().
4135
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004136- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4137 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4138
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004139- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004140 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4141 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4142
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004143- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4144 iterable object.
4145
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004146- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4147 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004148
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004149- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4150 authentication.
4151
4152- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4153 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004154
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004155- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004156 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4157 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4158 a sample driver.)
4159
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004160Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004161-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004162
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004163- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4164 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4165 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4166 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4167 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4168 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4169 kernel has large file support.
4170
4171- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4172 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4173 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4174 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4175 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4176
4177- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4178 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4179 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4180
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004181C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004182-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004183
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004184- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4185 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4186
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004187New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004188-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004189
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004190- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4191 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4192
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004193Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004194-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004195
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004196- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4197 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4198 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4199 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4200 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4201
4202- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4203 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4204 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4205 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4206
4207- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4208 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4209
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004210Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004211-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004212
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004213- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004214 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4215 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004216
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004217
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004218What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4219===========================
4220
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004221*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4222
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004223Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004224----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004225
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004226- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4227 big to represent as a C double.
4228
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004229- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4230 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4231 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4232 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4233 restriction).
4234
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004235- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4236 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4237 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4238 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4239 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4240
4241 >>> dir([])
4242 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4243 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4244 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4245 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4246 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4247 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4248 'reverse', 'sort']
4249
4250 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4251
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004252- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004253 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4254 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4255 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4256 OverflowError exception.
4257
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004258- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004259 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004260 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4261 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4262 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4263 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4264 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004265 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004266 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4267 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4268
4269 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4270 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4271 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4272 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004273
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004274- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004275 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4276 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4277 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4278 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4279 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4280 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4281 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4282 once it is created.
4283
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004284- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4285 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4286 (key, value) pairs.
4287
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004288- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004289 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4290 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4291
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004292- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4293 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4294 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4295 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4296 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004297
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004298- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004299 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4300 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4301
4302 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4303
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004304- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004305 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4306
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004307Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004308-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004309
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004310- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004311 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4312 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004313
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004314- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4315 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4316 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4317 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4318 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4319 in this area anymore).
4320
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004321- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4322 threading.Timer.
4323
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004324- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4325 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4326
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004327- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004328 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4329
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004330- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004331 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4332 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4333 converted to Python longs.
4334
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004335- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004336 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4337
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004338- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4339 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4340 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4341
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004342Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004343-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004344
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004345- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4346 division operators as per PEP 238.
4347
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004348Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004349-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004350
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004351- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4352 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4353 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4354 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4355
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004356C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004357-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004358
4359- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004360
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004361- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4362 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004363 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004364
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004365 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4366 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004367 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004368 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004369
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004370- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004371 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4372 module:
4373
4374 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004375
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004376 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4377 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004378
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004379 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4380 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004381
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004382 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4383
4384 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4385
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004386- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004387 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4388 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4389 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004390
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004391New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004392-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004393
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004394- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4395 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4396 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4397 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4398 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004399
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004400Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004401-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004402
4403Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004404-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004405
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004406- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4407 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4408 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4409 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004410 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4411 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4412 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4413 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4414 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004415
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004416- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004417 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4418
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004419
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004420What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4421===========================
4422
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004423*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4424
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004425Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004426-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004427
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004428- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4429 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4430
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004431- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4432 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4433 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004434
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004435- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4436 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4437 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4438 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004439
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004440- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4441
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004442- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004443
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004444Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004445-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004446
4447- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004448 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004449 the module docstring for details.
4450
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004451Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004452-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004453
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004454- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004455 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4456 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4457 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004458
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004459- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4460 Nick Mathewson.
4461
4462Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004463----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004464
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004465- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4466 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4467 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4468 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4469 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4470 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4471 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4472 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4473
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004474- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4475 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4476 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4477 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4478
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004479- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4480 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4481 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4482 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4483 come a long way).
4484
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004485- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4486 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4487 write filters for these warnings).
4488
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004489- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4490 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4491 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4492 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4493 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4494
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004495- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4496 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4497 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4498 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4499 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4500 older distribution.
4501
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004502Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004503-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004504
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004505- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4506 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004507 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004508
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004509- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4510 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4511 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4512
4513- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4514
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004515- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4516
4517- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4518
4519- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4520
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004521- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004522
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004523- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4524
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004525New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004526-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004527
4528C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004529-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004530
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004531- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4532 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4533 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4534 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4535 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4536 against buffer overruns.
4537
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004538- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004539 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4540 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004541 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4542 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4543 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4544
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004545- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4546 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4547 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4548 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4549 deprecated.
4550
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004551Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004552-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004553
4554- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4555 relevant is found.
4556
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004557
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004558What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004559===========================
4560
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004561*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4562
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004563Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004564----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004565
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004566- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4567 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4568 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4569 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4570 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4571 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4572 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4573 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004574 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004575 repaired.
4576
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004577- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004578 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004579 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4580 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4581 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4582 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4583 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4584 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4585 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4586 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4587
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004588- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4589 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4590 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4591 leading BMO character).
4592
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004593- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4594 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4595 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4596
4597 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4598 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4599 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004600
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004601 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4602 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4603 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4604 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4605 for various simple to use conversions.
4606
4607 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4608 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4609
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004610 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4611 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4612 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4613 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4614 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4615 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4616 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4617 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4618 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4619 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4620 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4621 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4622 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4623 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4624 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004625
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004626- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4627 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4628 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004629 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004630 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004631
4632 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004633 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4634 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4635 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4636 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4637 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004638 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4639 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004640
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004641 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4642 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4643 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004644 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004645
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004646- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4647 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4648 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4649 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4650 floating arithmetic,
4651
4652 x = 9007199254740992.0
4653 print long(x)
4654
4655 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4656 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4657 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4658 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4659 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4660 functions are of good quality).
4661
4662 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4663 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4664 algorithms to break.
4665
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004666- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4667 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4668 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4669 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4670 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4671 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4672 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4673 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4674 order.
4675
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004676- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4677 operation along the most common code paths.
4678
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004679- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4680 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4681
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004682- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4683 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4684 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4685 {}.update(UserDict())
4686
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004687- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4688 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4689 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4690 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4691 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4692 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4693 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4694 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4695
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004696- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004697 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004698
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004699 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004700 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4701 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004702 join() method of strings
4703 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004704 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4705 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004706 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004707 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004708
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004709- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4710 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4711
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004712- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4713 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4714
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004715- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4716 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4717 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4718 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4719
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004720- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4721 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004722 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004723 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4724 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004725
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004726- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4727
4728
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004729Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004730-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004731
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004732- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004733 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004734 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4735 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4736
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004737- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4738 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4739
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004740- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4741 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4742 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4743 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4744
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004745- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4746 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4747 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4748
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004749- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4750
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004751- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4752
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004753- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4754 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4755 that are still imported into string.py).
4756
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004757- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4758
4759- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4760 Now it does.
4761
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004762- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4763
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004764- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4765 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4766 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4767 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4768 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004769 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4770 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004771
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004772- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4773 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4774 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4775 'help(object)'.
4776
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004777Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004778-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004779
4780- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004781 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004782 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4783 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4784
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004785- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004786 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4787 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004788
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004789C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004790-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004791
4792- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4793 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004794
4795----
4796
4797**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**