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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
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
8================================
9
10*Release date: XXXX-XX-XX*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +000015- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
16 constant.
17
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +000018- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
19 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
20 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
21 large), and to anomalies such as
22 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
23 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
24 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
25 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000026
27Extension modules
28-----------------
29
30...
31
32Library
33-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +000034
35- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000036
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +000037- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
38 applications should use the getmember function.
39
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +000040- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
41
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +000042- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
43 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
44 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
45 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
46 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
47 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
48 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
49 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
50 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
51
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000052- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
53 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +000054 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000055
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000056- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
57 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
58 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
59 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
60 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
61 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
62 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
63 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000064
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +000065- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +000066 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
67 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
68 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
69 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
70 integration features instead. It would help if those were documented.
71
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +000072- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
73
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000074Build
75-----
76
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +000077- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
78 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
79 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
80 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
81 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000082
83C API
84-----
85
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +000086- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
87
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +000088- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
89 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
90 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +000091
92Documentation
93-------------
94
95...
96
97Tests
98-----
99
100- test__locale ported to unittest
101
102Windows
103-------
104
105...
106
107Mac
108---
109
110...
111
112New platforms
113-------------
114
115...
116
117Tools/Demos
118-----------
119
120...
121
122
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000123What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
124=================================
125
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000126*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000127
128Core and builtins
129-----------------
130
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000131- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000132 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
133
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000134- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
135 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
136 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
137 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
138 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
139 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
140 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
141 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000142 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
143 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
144 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
145 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
146 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000147
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000148- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
149 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
150 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
151 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
152 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
153
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000154- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
155
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000156- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
157 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
158
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000159- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
160 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
161 modified the list.
162
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000163- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
164 functions is now writable.
165
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000166- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
167 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
168 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
169 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
170
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000171- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
172 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
173 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
174 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
175 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000176
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000177- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
178 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
179
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000180Extension modules
181-----------------
182
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000183- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
184
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000185- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
186 data.
187
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000188- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
189 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
190 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
191 supposed to have been truncated away.
192
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000193- Added socket.socketpair().
194
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000195- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
196 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
197
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000198- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000199 versions of Python, have now been removed.
200
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000201Library
202-------
203
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000204- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000205 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000206
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000207- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
208 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
209
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000210- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
211 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
212
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000213- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
214
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000215- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
216 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000217
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000218- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
219 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
220
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000221- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
222
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000223- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
224
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000225- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
226
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000227- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
228 Percivall.
229
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000230- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
231 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
232
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000233- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
234 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
235 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000236 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000237
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000238- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
239 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
240 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
241 and exponent.
242
243- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
244
245- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
246 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
247 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
248
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000249- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
250 to the readline module.
251
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000252- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000253 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
254 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000255
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000256- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
257 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
258 contains symlinks.
259
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000260- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
261 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
262
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000263- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
264 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
265 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
266
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000267- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
268 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
269 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
270 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
271 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
272 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
273 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
274 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
275 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
276 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
277 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
278 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
279 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
280
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000281- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
282
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000283Tools/Demos
284-----------
285
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000286- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
287 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
288
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000289- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
290
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000291Build
292-----
293
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000294- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
295 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
296 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
297 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
298 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
299 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
300 plans to do so.
301
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000302- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
303 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
304
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000305- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
306 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
307
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000308- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
309 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
310
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000311- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
312 GNU/k*BSD systems.
313
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000314- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
315 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
316
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000317C API
318-----
319
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000320..
321
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000322Documentation
323-------------
324
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000325- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
326 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
327
328- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
329 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
330 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000331
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000332New platforms
333-------------
334
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000335- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
336
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000337Tests
338-----
339
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000340..
341
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000342Windows
343-------
344
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000345- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
346 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
347 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
348 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
349 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
350 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
351 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
352 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
353 the problem.
354
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000355Mac
356---
357
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000358..
359
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000360
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000361What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
362=================================
363
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000364*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000365
366Core and builtins
367-----------------
368
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000369- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
370 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
371 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
372 sensitive code.
373
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000374- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000375 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000376
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000377 @staticmethod
378 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000379
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000380 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000381
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000382- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
383 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
384 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
385 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
386 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
387 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
388 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
389 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
390 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
391 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
392 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
393
394 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
395 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
396 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
397 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
398 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
399 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
400 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
401
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000402- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
403 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
404
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000405- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000406 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000407
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000408- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000409 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000410 which was missing for no apparent reason.
411
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000412- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000413 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
414 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
415
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000416- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
417 types that support garbage collection.
418
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000419- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
420
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000421- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
422 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
423 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
424 Jython.
425
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000426- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
427
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000428- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
429 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
430
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000431- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
432 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
433 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000434
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000435- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
436 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
437 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
438
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000439Extension modules
440-----------------
441
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000442- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
443
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000444Library
445-------
446
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000447- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
448 TIS-620
449
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000450- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
451 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
452 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
453 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
454 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
455 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
456 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
457 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
458 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
459 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
460
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000461- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
462
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000463- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
464 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
465 same as when the argument is omitted).
466 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
467
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000468- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
469
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000470- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
471 schemes are offered.
472
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000473- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
474
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000475- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
476 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
477 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
478
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000479- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
480
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000481- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
482 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
483
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000484- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
485 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
486 when dummy_threading is being used.
487
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000488- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
489 from a tarfile.
490
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000491- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000492 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000493
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000494- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
495 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
496 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
497 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
498
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000499- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
500 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
501
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000502- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
503 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
504 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
505 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
506 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
507 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
508 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
509 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
510 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
511 by some other method in progress).
512
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000513- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
514 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
515 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000516
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000517- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
518
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000519- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
520 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
521 AM Kuchling.
522
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000523- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
524 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
525 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
526
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000527- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
528 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
529 instead of unsigned.
530
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000531- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000532 no longer part of the public API.
533
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000534- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
535 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
536 string methods of the same name).
537
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000538- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000539 SF patch 945642.
540
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000541- doctest unittest integration improvements:
542
543 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
544
545 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
546 DocTestSuites.
547
548- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
549 that provide thread-local data.
550
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000551- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
552 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
553
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000554- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
555
556- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
557 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
558 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
559
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000560- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
561
562 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
563 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
564 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000565
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000566 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
567 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
568 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
569 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
570
571 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
572 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
573
574 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
575 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
576 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
577 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
578
579 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
580 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
581 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
582 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
583 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
584
585 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
586 wrapping help output.
587
588 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
589 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
590 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000591
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000592C API
593-----
594
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000595- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
596 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
597 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
598 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
599 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
600 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
601 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
602 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
603 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
604 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
605 its visible semantics have not changed.
606
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000607- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
608 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
609
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000610Documentation
611-------------
612
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000613- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000614
615 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000616 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000617
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000618 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000619
620 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
621
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000622- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000623
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000624Tests
625-----
626
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000627- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000628 platforms that use the Makefile.
629
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000630- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
631 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
632 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
633
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000634
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000635What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
636=================================
637
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000638*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000639
640Core and builtins
641-----------------
642
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000643- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
644 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
645 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
646 objects now (one object instead of three).
647
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000648- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
649 Windows DLLs.
650
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000651- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
652 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000653
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000654- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
655 a new .pyc magic.
656
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000657- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
658 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
659 be there.
660
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000661- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
662 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
663 the LC_NUMERIC category.
664
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000665- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
666 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
667 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
668
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000669- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
670
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000671- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
672 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
673 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000674
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000675- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
676 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
677
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000678- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
679
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000680- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000681 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000682
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000683- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
684
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000685- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
686
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000687- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
688 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
689
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000690- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
691 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
692 Fixes bug #858016 .
693
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000694- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
695 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
696 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
697
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000698- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
699 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
700 improves their performance (about 35%).
701
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000702- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
703 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
704 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
705
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000706- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
707 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
708 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
709 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
710
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000711- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
712 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
713 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
714 length is not known).
715
716- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
717 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000718 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
719 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000720 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
721
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000722- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
723 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
724
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000725- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
726 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
727 keyword arguments.
728
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000729- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
730 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
731 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
732
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000733- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
734 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
735 cases.
736
737- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
738 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
739 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
740 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
741 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
742 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
743 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
744 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
745 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
746 a release build.
747
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000748- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
749 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
750
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000751- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000752 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000753
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000754- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
755 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
756 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
757 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
758 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
759 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
760 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
761 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
762 destroyed.
763
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000764- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
765 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
766 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
767 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
768 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
769 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
770 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
771 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
772
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000773- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
774 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
775 character other than a space.
776
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000777- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
778 by the function object or by the method object, the function
779 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
780 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
781 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
782 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
783 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
784 attributes with the same name.
785
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000786- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
787 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
788 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
789 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
790 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
791 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
792 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
793 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
794 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
795 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
796 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
797 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
798 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
799 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000800
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000801- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
802 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
803 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
804 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
805 This has been repaired.
806
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000807- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
808
809- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
810
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000811- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
812 over a sequence.
813
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000814- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000815 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000816
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000817- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
818
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000819- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
820 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
821 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
822 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
823 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
824 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
825 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
826 records with equal keys is unchanged).
827
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000828- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
829 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
830 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
831
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000832- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
833 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
834 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
835 freelist.
836
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000837- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
838 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
839
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000840- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
841 number.
842
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000843- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
844 a TypeError exception.
845
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000846- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
847 820195.
848
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000849- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
850 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
851 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
852
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000853- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000854 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
855 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000856
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000857- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
858 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
859 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
860
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000861- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
862 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000863 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000864
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000865- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000866 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
867 the first call.
868
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000869
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000870Extension modules
871-----------------
872
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000873- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
874 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
875
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000876- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
877 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
878 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
879 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
880 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
881 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
882 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000883
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000884- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
885
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000886- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
887
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000888- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
889 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
890
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000891- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
892 fewer false positives.
893
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000894- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
895 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
896
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000897- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000898 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
899
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000900- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000901 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000902 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +0000903 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
904 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000905
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000906- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
907 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
908 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
909 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
910
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000911- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
912 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
913 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
914 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
915 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
916 #897625.
917
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000918- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
919 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
920
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000921- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
922 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
923 and pops on either side of the deque.
924
925- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
926 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
927
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000928- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
929 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
930 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
931 other functions that expect a function argument.
932
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000933- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
934
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000935- os.getsid was added.
936
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000937- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
938 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
939 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
940
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000941- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
942
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000943- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
944
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000945- readline.clear_history was added.
946
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000947- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
948
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000949- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
950
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000951- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
952
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000953- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
954
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000955- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
956
957- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
958
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000959- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
960
961- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
962
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000963- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
964 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
965 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
966
967- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
968 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
969 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
970 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
971 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
972 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
973 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
974
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000975- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
976 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
977 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
978 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000979
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000980- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000981 iterators from a single iterable.
982
983- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
984 of raising a TypeError exception.
985
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000986- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
987 as parameter.
988
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000989Library
990-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000991
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000992- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
993 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
994 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000995
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000996- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
997 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
998 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000999
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001000- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001001
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001002- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1003 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001004
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001005- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1006 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1007
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001008- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1009
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001010- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001011 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001012
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001013- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001014 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001015
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001016- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1017
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001018- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1019 on cygwin and mingw32.
1020
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001021- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1022
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001023- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1024 module.
1025
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001026- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1027 installation scheme for all platforms.
1028
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001029- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001030 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001031
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001032- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1033 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1034 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1035
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001036- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1037 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1038 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1039
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001040- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1041
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001042- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1043
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001044- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1045 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1046
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001047- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1048 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1049 type pattern with the same value exists.
1050
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001051- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1052 when run from the command prompt).
1053
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001054- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1055 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1056
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001057- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1058 default sort).
1059
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001060- Added global runctx function to profile module
1061
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001062- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1063
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001064- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1065
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001066- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1067
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001068- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001069 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1070 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1071 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1072 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1073 accordingly.
1074
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001075- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1076 decoding standards.
1077
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001078- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1079 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1080 called for all requests.
1081
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001082- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1083 they are passed to the compiler.
1084
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001085- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1086 indent, width and depth.
1087
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001088- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1089 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1090
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001091- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1092 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1093
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001094- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1095
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001096- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1097
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001098- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1099
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001100- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1101 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1102
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001103- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001104 for better performance.
1105
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001106- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001107
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001108- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1109 a string).
1110
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001111- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1112
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001113- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1114
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001115- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1116
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001117- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1118
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001119- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1120 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1121 list of fieldnames.
1122
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001123- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1124 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1125
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001126- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1127
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001128- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1129 empty lists.
1130
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001131- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1132 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1133 and shelves.
1134
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001135- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1136 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1137
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001138- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001139 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1140 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001141
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001142- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1143 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001144 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001145
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001146- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001147 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1148 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1149
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001150- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1151 and removed in Py2.4.
1152
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001153- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1154
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001155- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1156
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001157Tools/Demos
1158-----------
1159
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001160- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1161 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1162
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001163- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1164
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001165- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1166 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1167 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1168 destination in situations where both files are given.
1169
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001170- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1171 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1172 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1173 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1174
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001175- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1176
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001177- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1178 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1179 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1180 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1181 now.
1182
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001183- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1184 in effect
1185
1186- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1187 C-c C-h
1188
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001189- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1190 -d option was given.
1191
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001192Build
1193-----
1194
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001195- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1196 build under OS X.
1197
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001198- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1199 --enable-profiling.
1200
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001201- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1202 is configured --with-tsc.
1203
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001204- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1205 on AMD64.
1206
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001207- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1208 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1209
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001210- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1211 removed.
1212
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001213- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1214 supported (see PEP 11).
1215
1216- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1217
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001218- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1219
1220- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1221 (see PEP 11).
1222
1223- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1224 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1225
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001226C API
1227-----
1228
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001229- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1230 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1231 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1232
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001233- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1234 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1235 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1236 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1237
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001238- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1239 generator objects.
1240
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001241- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1242 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001243 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1244 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001245
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001246- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1247 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1248
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001249- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1250 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1251 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1252 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1253 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1254
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001255- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1256 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1257 about 10% faster.
1258
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001259- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1260 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1261
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001262- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1263 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1264 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1265 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1266
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001267Windows
1268-------
1269
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001270- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1271 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1272 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1273 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1274
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001275- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1276 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1277 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1278
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001279
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001280What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1281===============================
1282
1283*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1284
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001285IDLE
1286----
1287
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001288- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1289 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1290 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1291 context-menu actions.
1292
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001293- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1294 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1295 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1296 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1297 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1298 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1299 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1300 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1301 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1302
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001303
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001304What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1305=============================================
1306
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001307*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001308
1309Core and builtins
1310-----------------
1311
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001312- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001313 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001314 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1315
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001316Extension modules
1317-----------------
1318
1319- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1320 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1321 than once. This has been fixed.
1322
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001323- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1324 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1325 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1326 call.
1327
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001328- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1329
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001330Library
1331-------
1332
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001333- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1334 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1335
1336- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1337 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1338 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1339 restored.
1340
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001341IDLE
1342----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001343
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001344- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001345
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001346Build
1347-----
1348
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001349- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1350 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1351
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001352C API
1353-----
1354
1355Windows
1356-------
1357
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001358- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1359 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1360
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001361- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1362
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001363Mac
1364---
1365
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001366- Various fixes to pimp.
1367
1368- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1369
1370- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1371 more problems than it solves.
1372
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001373
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001374What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1375=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001376
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001377*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1378
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001379Core and builtins
1380-----------------
1381
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001382- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1383 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1384
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001385- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1386 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001387 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001388
1389- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1390 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1391 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001392 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001393
1394- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1395 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001396
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001397- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1398 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1399 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1400
1401- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001402 770247.
1403
1404- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001405
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001406Extension modules
1407-----------------
1408
1409- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1410 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1411
1412- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1413
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001414- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1415
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001416- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1417 contained within the _strptime module.
1418
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001419- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1420 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1421
1422- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001423 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1424
1425- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1426 the find_class attribute, if present.
1427
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001428- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001429
1430 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1431 (SF bug 763298).
1432
1433 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001434 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1435 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1436 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001437
1438 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1439
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001440Library
1441-------
1442
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001443- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1444
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001445- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1446 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1447 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1448 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1449 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1450 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1451 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1452 or Tester().
1453
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001454- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1455 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1456 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1457 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1458 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1459 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1460 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1461 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1462 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001463
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001464 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001465
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001466- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1467 weren't before was an oversight.
1468
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001469- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1470 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1471
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001472- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1473 when there are no lines.
1474
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001475- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1476 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1477
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001478- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1479 to child processes.
1480
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001481- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1482
1483- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1484
1485- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1486 xmlrpclib.
1487
1488- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1489 responses.
1490
1491- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1492 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1493
1494- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1495 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1496 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1497
1498- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1499 used as patterns.
1500
1501- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1502 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1503 than Tk 8.3.
1504
1505- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1506
1507- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001508
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001509Tools/Demos
1510-----------
1511
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001512- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1513
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001514- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1515
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001516- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001517
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001518Build
1519-----
1520
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001521- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1522
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001523- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1524
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001525- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1526 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001527
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001528- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1529 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1530 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001531
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001532C API
1533-----
1534
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001535- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1536 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1537
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001538Windows
1539-------
1540
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001541- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1542 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1543 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1544 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1545 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1546 Python exception ::
1547
1548 thread.error: can't start new thread
1549
1550 is raised now.
1551
1552- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1553 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1554 instead of from DLL teardown.
1555
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001556Mac
1557---
1558
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001559- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001560 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001561 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1562 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1563 the executable in the bundle.
1564
1565- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001566
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001567- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1568
1569- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1570 on Panther.
1571
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001572What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1573================================
1574
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001575*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001576
1577Core and builtins
1578-----------------
1579
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001580- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1581 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1582 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1583 with the -i option.
1584
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001585- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1586 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1587
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001588- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1589 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1590
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001591- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1592 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1593 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1594 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1595 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1596 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1597 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1598 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1599 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1600 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1601 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1602 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1603 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001604
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001605- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1606 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1607 embedded in a lambda expression.
1608
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001609- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1610 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1611 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1612 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1613 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1614
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001615- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1616 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1617 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1618
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001619- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1620 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1621
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001622- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1623 It's writable again.
1624
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001625- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1626 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1627 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001628 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001629
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001630- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1631 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1632 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1633
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001634Extension modules
1635-----------------
1636
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001637- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1638 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1639
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001640- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1641 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1642 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1643 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1644
1645- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1646 collection.
1647
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001648- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1649 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1650 unique within a single program run.
1651
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001652- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1653 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1654
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001655- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1656 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1657
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001658- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1659 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001660
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001661- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1662
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001663- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1664 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1665
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001666- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1667 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1668 for many BSD-derived systems.
1669
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001670
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001671Library
1672-------
1673
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001674- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1675 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1676 primary ones:
1677
1678 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1679 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1680 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1681
1682 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1683 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1684 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1685 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1686 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1687 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1688
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001689- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1690 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1691 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1692 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1693 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1694 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1695 argument.
1696
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001697- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1698 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1699 in the archive.
1700
1701- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1702 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1703
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001704- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1705 569574).
1706
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001707- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1708 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1709 no more.
1710
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001711- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1712 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1713 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1714 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1715 code coverage.
1716
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001717- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1718 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1719 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001720 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1721 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001722
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001723- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1724 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1725 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001726 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001727
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001728- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1729
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001730- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1731 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1732 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1733 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1734
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001735- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1736 handling.
1737
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001738- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1739 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1740
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001741- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1742 in socket.py.
1743
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001744- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1745
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001746- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1747 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1748 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1749 opener with proxy support.
1750
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001751- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1752
1753- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1754
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001755Tools/Demos
1756-----------
1757
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001758- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1759
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001760- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1761
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001762- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1763 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001764
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001765- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1766 files.
1767
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001768Build
1769-----
1770
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001771- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001772 different root directory.
1773
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001774C API
1775-----
1776
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001777- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1778 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1779 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1780 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1781 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1782 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1783 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1784 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1785 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1786 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1787
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001788- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1789 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1790 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1791 from Python.
1792
1793
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001794New platforms
1795-------------
1796
1797None this time.
1798
1799Tests
1800-----
1801
1802- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1803 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1804
1805Windows
1806-------
1807
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001808- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1809
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001810- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1811 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1812 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1813 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1814 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1815 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1816 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1817 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1818 that's what it's for.
1819
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001820Mac
1821---
1822
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001823- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1824 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1825 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1826 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001827- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1828 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1829- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001830
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001831SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1832------------------------------------
1833
1834430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1835598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1836622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1837661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1838683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1839697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1840713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1841724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1842727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1843729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1844730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1845731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1846732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1847733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1848735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1849740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1850744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1851745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1852747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1853749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1854751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1855753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1856755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1857757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1858760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1859
1860
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001861What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1862================================
1863
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001864*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001865
1866Core and builtins
1867-----------------
1868
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001869- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1870 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1871
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001872- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1873 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1874 and cannot be strings).
1875
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001876- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1877 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1878 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1879 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1880
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001881- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1882 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1883 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1884 Python itself.
1885
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001886- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1887 the referenced object, if it has one.
1888
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001889- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1890 the thread started at
1891 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1892
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001893- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1894 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1895 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1896 placed on a list index.
1897
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001898- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1899 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1900 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1901 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1902
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001903- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1904 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1905 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1906 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1907 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1908 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1909 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1910
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001911- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1912 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1913 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1914 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1915 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1916
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001917- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1918 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001919
1920- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1921 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1922 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1923 #693195.)
1924
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001925- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1926 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001927
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001928- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001929 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001930 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1931 interpreter executions, would fail.
1932
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001933- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001934 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001935 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001936
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001937Extension modules
1938-----------------
1939
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001940- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1941 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1942 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1943 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1944
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001945- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1946 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1947
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001948- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1949 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1950 and Greg Chapman.)
1951
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001952- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1953 recursively.
1954
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001955- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001956 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1957 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1958 leaks.
1959
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001960- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1961
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001962- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1963 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1964 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1965 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1966 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1967 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1968 #705836.
1969
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001970- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001971 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1972
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001973- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1974 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1975 See SF bug #692416.
1976
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001977- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1978 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1979
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001980- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1981 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1982 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001983
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001984- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001985 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1986 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1987
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001988- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1989 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1990 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1991 timeouts to work properly.
1992
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001993Library
1994-------
1995
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001996- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1997 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1998 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1999 future release.
2000
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002001- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2002 for querying platform dependent features.
2003
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002004- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002005
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002006- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2007 pickle protocol versions.
2008
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002009- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2010 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2011 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2012
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002013- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2014
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002015- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2016 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2017 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2018 modules.
2019
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002020- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2021 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2022 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2023
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002024- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2025 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2026
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002027- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2028 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2029 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2030
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002031- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002032 MS Office extensions.
2033
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002034- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2035 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2036
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002037- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2038 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2039
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002040- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2041 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2042 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2043 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2044 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2045 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2046
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002047- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2048 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2049 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002050
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002051- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2052 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2053 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2054
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002055- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2056
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002057- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2058 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2059 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2060
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002061Tools/Demos
2062-----------
2063
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002064- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2065 See the module docstring for details.
2066
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002067Build
2068-----
2069
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002070- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2071 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002072
2073C API
2074-----
2075
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002076- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2077
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002078- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2079 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2080 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2081
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002082- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2083 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002084
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002085 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2086 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2087 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002088
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002089- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002090 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2091
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002092- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2093 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2094 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002095
2096New platforms
2097-------------
2098
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002099None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002100
2101Tests
2102-----
2103
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002104- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2105 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002106
2107Windows
2108-------
2109
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002110- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2111 function.
2112
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002113- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2114 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002115
2116Mac
2117---
2118
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002119- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2120 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002121
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002122- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2123 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002124
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002125- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2126 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2127 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002128
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002129- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002130 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2131 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002132
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002133- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2134 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002135
2136
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002137What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2138=================================
2139
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002140*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002141
2142Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002143-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002144
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002145- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2146 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2147 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2148
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002149- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2150 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2151 (SF patch #664376.)
2152
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002153- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2154 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2155 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2156 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2157 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2158 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002159 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002160
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002161- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2162 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2163 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2164 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002165 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002166
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002167- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2168 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2169 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2170 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2171 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2172 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2173 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2174 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2175 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2176 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2177 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2178
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002179- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2180 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2181 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2182 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2183 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2184 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2185
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002186- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2187 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2188
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002189- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2190 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2191 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2192 case.)
2193
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002194- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2195 passed as unicode strings.
2196
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002197- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2198 See SF bug #683467.
2199
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002200- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2201 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2202
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002203- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2204
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002205- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2206
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002207- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2208 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2209 arguments.
2210
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002211- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2212 See SF bug #667147.
2213
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002214- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002215 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002216 See SF bug #676155.
2217
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002218- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002219 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002220 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2221 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2222 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2223 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2224 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2225 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002226
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002227Extension modules
2228-----------------
2229
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002230- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2231 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2232 tp_as_number pointer.
2233
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002234- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2235 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2236 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2237 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2238 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2239
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002240- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2241
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002242- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2243
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002244- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002245 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002246 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2247 patch #678531.)
2248
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002249- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2250 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2251
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002252- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2253 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2254
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002255- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2256
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002257- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2258 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2259 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2260
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002261- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2262
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002263- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2264 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2265
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002266- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002267
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002268- datetime changes:
2269
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002270 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2271
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002272 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2273 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2274 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2275 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2276 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2277 now.
2278
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002279 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002280 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2281 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002282
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002283 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002284 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002285 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2286 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2287 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2288 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002289
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002290 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2291 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2292 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002293 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2294
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002295 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2296 by a later example coded by Guido.
2297
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002298 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002299 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2300 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2301 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002302 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2303 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2304
2305 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2306 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2307 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2308 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2309 tzinfo subclass instance.
2310
2311 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2312 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2313 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2314 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2315 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2316 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2317 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2318 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002319
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002320 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2321 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2322 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2323 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2324 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002325 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2326
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002327 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002328
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002329 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2330 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2331 as a naive datetime object.
2332
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002333 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2334 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2335 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2336
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002337 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2338 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2339 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2340 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2341 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2342 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2343 comparison.
2344
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002345 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2346 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2347 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2348 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002349 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002350
2351 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002352
2353 and ::
2354
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002355 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2356
2357 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2358 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2359 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2360 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2361
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002362 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2363 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2364 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2365 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2366 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2367
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002368 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2369 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002370 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2371 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002372
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002373Library
2374-------
2375
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002376- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2377 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2378
2379- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2380 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2381 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2382 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2383 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2384 See PEP 307 for details.
2385
2386- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2387 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2388
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002389- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2390 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002391 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002392 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2393 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002394 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002395
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002396- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2397 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2398
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002399- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2400 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2401 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2402
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002403- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2404
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002405- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2406 exception.
2407
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002408- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2409 class.
2410
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002411- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2412 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2413 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2414
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002415- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2416 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2417
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002418- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002419 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2420 See SF bug #659228.
2421
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002422- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2423 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2424 See SF patch #651082.
2425
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002426- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002427
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002428- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2429 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2430
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002431- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002432 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002433
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002434- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2435 DOS paths from other platforms.
2436
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002437Tools/Demos
2438-----------
2439
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002440- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2441 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2442 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2443 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2444 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2445 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2446 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2447 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2448 example:
2449
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002450 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2451 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002452
2453 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2454
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002455
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002456Build
2457-----
2458
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002459- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2460 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2461 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002462 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2463
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002464 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2465
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002466- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2467 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2468 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2469 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2470 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2471 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2472 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2473 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2474 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2475
2476- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2477 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2478 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2479 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2480
2481- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2482 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2483
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002484C API
2485-----
2486
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002487- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2488 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002489
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002490- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2491 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2492 tp_as_number pointer.
2493
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002494- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2495 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2496 (SF #681367)
2497
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002498- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2499 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2500 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2501 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002502
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002503Tests
2504-----
2505
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002506- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002507 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2508 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2509 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2510 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2511 pydoc.)
2512
2513- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2514
2515- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002516
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002517Windows
2518-------
2519
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002520- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2521 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2522 time).
2523
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002524- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2525 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2526
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002527- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2528 release without strong cryptography.
2529
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002530- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002531 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002532
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002533- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2534 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2535
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002536Mac
2537---
2538
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002539- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2540 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002541
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002542- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2543 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2544 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002545
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002546- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2547 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002548
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002549- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2550 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2551 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2552 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002553
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002554- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002555 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2556 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2557 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002558
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002559
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002560What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002561=================================
2562
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002563*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002564
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002565Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002566--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002567
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002568- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2569
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002570- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2571 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002572 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002573 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002574 a different meaning than before.
2575
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002576- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002577 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002578 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002579
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002580- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002581 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002582 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002583
2584- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2585 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2586 and deallocation.
2587
2588- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2589 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2590
2591- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2592 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2593 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2594 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2595 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2596
2597- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2598 now detected by the garbage collector.
2599
2600- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2601 [SF bug 519621]
2602
2603- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2604 identifier.
2605
2606- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2607 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2608 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2609 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2610 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2611 [SF bug 563060]
2612
2613- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2614 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2615 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2616 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2617 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2618
2619- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2620 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2621 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2622
2623- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2624
2625- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2626 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2627 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2628 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2629 state of the slots would be lost.)
2630
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002631Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002632-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002633
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002634- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002635 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2636 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2637 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2638 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002639 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2640 Jython 2.1.
2641
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002642- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002643 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002644 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2645 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2646 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2647 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2648 these, see PEP 302.
2649
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002650- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2651 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2652 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2653
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002654- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2655 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2656 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2657
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002658- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2659 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2660 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2661
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002662- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2663 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2664 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2665 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2666 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2667 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2668 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2669 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2670 releases or implementations.
2671
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002672- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002673 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2674 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002675
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002676- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2677 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2678
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002679- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2680 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2681 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2682
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002683- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2684 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2685
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002686- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2687 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002688 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2689 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002690
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002691- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2692 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2693 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2694 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2695 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2696
2697 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2698 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2699 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2700 pattern.
2701
2702 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2703 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2704 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2705 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2706
2707 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2708 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2709 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2710 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2711 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2712 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2713
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002714- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2715 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2716 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2717 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2718 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2719 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2720 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2721 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002722
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002723- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2724 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2725 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2726 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2727 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002728 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2729 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2730 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2731 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2732 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2733 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2734 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002735
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002736- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2737 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2738
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002739- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2740 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2741 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2742 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2743 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2744 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2745 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2746 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2747 to Zack Weinberg!
2748
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002749- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2750 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2751 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2752 type. This has been fixed now.
2753
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002754- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2755 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2756 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2757
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002758- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2759 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2760 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2761 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2762 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2763 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2764 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2765 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002766 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002767
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002768- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2769 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2770 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002771
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002772- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2773 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2774 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2775 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2776 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2777 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2778 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2779 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002780 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002781 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2782 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2783
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002784- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2785 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2786 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2787 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2788 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2789 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2790 this.)
2791
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002792- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2793 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002794 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002795 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002796 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2797 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002798 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2799 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002800
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002801- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2802 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2803 currently running.
2804
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002805- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2806 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2807 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2808 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2809
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002810- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2811 as directory names.
2812
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002813- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2814 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2815
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002816- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2817 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2818
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002819- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002820 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2821 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002822
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002823- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2824 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2825 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2826 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2827 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2828
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002829- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2830 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2831 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2832 removed.
2833
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002834- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2835 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2836 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2837
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002838- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2839 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2840 to __debug__.
2841
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002842- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2843 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2844 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2845
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002846- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2847 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2848 deprecated now.
2849
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002850- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2851 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2852 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002853
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002854- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2855 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2856 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2857 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2858 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002859
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002860- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2861 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2862
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002863- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2864 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2865 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002866 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002867 is backward compatible.
2868
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002869- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2870 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2871 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2872 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2873 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2874
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002875- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2876 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2877 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2878 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2879 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2880 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002881
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002882- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2883 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2884
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002885- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2886 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2887
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002888- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2889 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2890 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2891 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2892 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2893
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002894- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2895 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2896 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2897
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002898- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002899 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2900
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002901- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2902 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2903 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002904
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002905- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2906 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2907
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002908- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2909 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2910 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2911
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002912- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2913
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002914Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002915-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002916
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002917- Added three operators to the operator module:
2918 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2919 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2920 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2921
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002922- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2923
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002924- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2925 archives.
2926
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002927- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2928 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2929 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2930
2931 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2932
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002933- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2934 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2935 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002936 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002937
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002938- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2939 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2940 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2941 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002942 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2943 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2944 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2945 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002946
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002947- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2948 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002949
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002950- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2951
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002952- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2953 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2954
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002955- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2956 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2957 supported.
2958
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002959- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2960
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002961- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2962 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002963
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002964- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2965 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2966
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002967- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2968
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002969- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2970 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2971
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002972- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2973 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2974 functions but callable type objects.
2975
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002976- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002977 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002978 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002979
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002980- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2981 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002982
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002983- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2984 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002985
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002986- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2987 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2988 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2989 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2990
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002991- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2992 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002993
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002994- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2995 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2996 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2997 and __imul__.
2998
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002999- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003000 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3001 is called.
3002
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003003- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3004 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3005 interpreter was compiled.
3006
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003007- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3008 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3009 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003010 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003011 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3012 1, not 2.
3013
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003014- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3015 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3016 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3017 limit.
3018
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003019- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3020 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3021 bug #623464.
3022
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003023- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3024 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3025 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3026 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3027
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003028Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003029-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003030
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003031- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3032
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003033- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3034 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3035 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3036 with Python 2.3a2.
3037
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003038- os.path exposes getctime.
3039
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003040- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003041 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003042 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003043 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003044 unit tests of floating point results.
3045
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003046- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3047 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3048 has been increased.
3049
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003050- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3051 executed.
3052
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003053- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3054 postinstallation script.
3055
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003056- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3057 test the current module.
3058
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003059- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003060 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3061 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3062 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3063 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3064
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003065- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003066 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003067 Ward's Optik package.
3068
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003069- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3070 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3071 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3072 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3073
3074- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3075 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003076 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003077
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003078- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3079 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3080 shelf are binary pickles.
3081
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003082- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3083 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3084
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003085- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3086 modules are iterators now.
3087
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003088- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3089 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3090 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3091 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3092 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3093 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003094
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003095- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3096 with their entity value.
3097
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003098- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3099
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003100- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3101 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003102
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003103- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3104 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003105 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003106
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003107- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3108 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3109 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3110 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3111 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3112 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3113 main():
3114
3115 import locale
3116 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3117
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003118- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3119 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3120
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003121- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3122 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3123 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3124 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3125 to the new standard.
3126
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003127- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3128 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3129 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3130 an extension to the database.
3131
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003132- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3133 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3134 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3135 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003136 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003137
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003138- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003139 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003140
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003141- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3142 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3143 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3144 bounded integers.
3145
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003146- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3147 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3148 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3149 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3150 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3151 in existence.
3152
3153 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3154 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3155 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3156 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3157 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3158 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3159
3160 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3161 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3162 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3163 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3164
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003165- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3166 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3167 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3168
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003169- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3170
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003171- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3172 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3173 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3174 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3175
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003176- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3177 argument.
3178
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003179- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3180 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3181 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3182 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3183 [SF patch 560794].
3184
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003185- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3186 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3187 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003188 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3189 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3190 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003191
3192- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3193 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003194
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003195- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3196 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3197 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3198 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003199
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003200- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3201 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3202 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3203 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3204 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3205
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003206- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003207
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003208- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3209
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003210- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3211 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3212 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3213 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3214 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3215 identical to None.
3216
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003217- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3218 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3219 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3220 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3221 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3222 results now.
3223
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003224- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3225 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3226
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003227- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3228 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3229 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3230 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3231 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3232 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3233 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3234 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3235
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003236- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3237
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003238- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3239 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3240
3241- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3242 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3243 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3244 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3245 and other systems.
3246
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003247- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3248 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3249 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3250 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 +00003251 work well with these.
3252
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003253- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3254
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003255- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003256 connections.
3257
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003258- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3259 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3260 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3261
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003262- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3263 sets
3264
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003265- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3266 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3267 name.
3268
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003269- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3270 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3271 passed in.
3272
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003273- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003274 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003275 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3276 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003277
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003278- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3279
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003280- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3281
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003282- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3283 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3284 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3285
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003286- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3287 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3288 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3289 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003290 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003291
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003292- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003293 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003294 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003295
3296- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3297 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3298 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3299
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003300- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003301 the value of its expression argument.
3302
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003303- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3304 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3305 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3306
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003307- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3308 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3309 skipstone browser was included.
3310
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003311- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3312 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3313
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003314Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003315-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003316
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003317- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3318 names in addition to accepting file names.
3319
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003320- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3321 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3322 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3323 still used and useful.)
3324
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003325- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3326 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3327 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3328 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003329
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003330- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3331 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3332 the generated binary.
3333
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003334Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003335-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003336
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003337- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3338
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003339- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3340 except in the hands of experts.
3341
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003342- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003343 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3344 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3345 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003346
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003347- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3348 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3349 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3350 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3351 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3352 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3353 builds.
3354
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003355- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3356 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3357 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3358 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3359 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3360 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3361 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3362 new type.
3363
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003364- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003365
3366 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3367 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3368 positive infinities.
3369
3370 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3371 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3372 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3373 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3374 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3375 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3376 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3377
3378 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3379
3380 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3381
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003382- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3383 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3384 size of the executable.
3385
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003386- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3387 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3388 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3389 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003390
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003391- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3392
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003393- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3394 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3395 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003396
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003397- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3398 well as Unix.
3399
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003400- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3401 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3402 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3403 modules in the README file for details.
3404
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003405C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003406-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003407
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003408- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3409 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003410 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003411 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003412 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003413
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003414- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3415 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3416 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3417 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3418 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3419 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003420 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003421 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3422 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3423 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3424 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3425 aligned.)
3426
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003427- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3428 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3429 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3430
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003431- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3432 level.
3433
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003434- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3435 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3436 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3437 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3438 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3439
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003440- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3441 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3442 code.
3443
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003444- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3445 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3446 adjusting for negative indices.
3447
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003448- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3449 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3450 object.
3451
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003452- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3453 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3454 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3455
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003456- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3457 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003458
3459- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3460
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003461- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3462 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3463 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3464 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3465
3466- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3467
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003468- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003469
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003470- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003471 without going through the buffer API.
3472
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003473- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003474
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003475- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3476 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3477 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3478 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3479
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003480- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3481 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3482
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003483- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003484 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3485
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003486New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003487-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003488
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003489- OpenVMS is now supported.
3490
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003491- AtheOS is now supported.
3492
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003493- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3494
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003495- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3496
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003497Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003498-----
3499
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003500- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3501 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3502 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003503
3504Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003505-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003506
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003507- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3508 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3509 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3510 bugs.
3511 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003512 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003513 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3514 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003515 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003516
3517- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003518 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003519
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003520- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3521 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3522
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003523- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3524 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003525 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003526 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3527
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003528- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3529 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3530 use files" uninstall option).
3531
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003532- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3533
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003534- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3535 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3536
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003537- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3538 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3539 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3540
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003541- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3542 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3543 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3544 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3545 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003546 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3547 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3548 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003549
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003550- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003551 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003552 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3553 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3554 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3555 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3556 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3557 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3558 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3559 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3560 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3561 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3562 work around.
3563
3564- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3565 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3566 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3567 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3568 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3569 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3570 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3571 specified with O_CREAT too).
3572
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003573Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003574----
3575
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003576- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003577
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003578- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3579 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3580 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3581
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003582- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3583 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3584 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3585
3586- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3587 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3588 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3589 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3590 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3591 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3592 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3593 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003594
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003595- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3596 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3597 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003598
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003599- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3600 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3601 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3602 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3603 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003604
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003605- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3606 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3607 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003608
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003609- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3610 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003611
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003612- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3613 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3614 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3615 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3616 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003617
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003618- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3619 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3620 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3621
3622- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3623 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3624 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003625
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003626- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3627 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3628 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3629 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003630 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003631
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003632- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3633 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003634
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003635- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3636 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003637
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003638- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003639 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003640 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3641 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003642
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003643
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003644What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003645===============================
3646
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003647*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3648
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003649Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003650--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003651
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003652- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3653 with a custom metaclass.
3654
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003655Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003656-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003657
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003658- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3659 are proxies.
3660
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003661Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003662-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003663
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003664- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3665 very short strings.
3666
3667- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3668 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3669 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3670 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3671 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3672
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003673Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003674-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003675
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003676- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3677 close or delete time).
3678
3679- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3680 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3681
3682- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3683
3684- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003685 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003686
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003687Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003688-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003689
3690Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003691-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003692
3693C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003694-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003695
3696New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003697-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003698
3699Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003700-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003701
3702Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003703-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003704
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003705- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3706
3707- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3708 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3709
3710- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3711 deleted at process exit time.
3712
3713- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3714 in backslash.
3715
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003716Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003717----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003718
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003719- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3720 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3721 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3722
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003723
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003724What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003725===========================
3726
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003727*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3728
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003729Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003730--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003731
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003732- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3733 been extensively updated. See
3734
3735 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3736
3737 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3738
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003739- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3740 deleted!
3741
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003742- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3743 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3744 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3745 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3746 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3747
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003748- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3749
3750 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3751 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3752
3753 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3754 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3755 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3756 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3757 supported anyway.
3758
3759 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3760 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3761
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003762- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3763 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3764 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3765 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3766 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003767
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003768- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3769 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3770 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3771
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003772Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003773-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003774
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003775- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3776 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3777 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3778 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3779 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3780 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003781 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3782 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3783 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3784 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003785
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003786- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3787 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3788 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3789
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003790Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003791-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003792
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003793- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3794
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003795Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003796-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003797
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003798- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3799 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3800 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3801 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3802 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3803 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3804
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003805- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3806
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003807- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3808
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003809- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3810
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003811- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3812 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3813 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3814
3815- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3816
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003817Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003818-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003819
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003820- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3821 off a search on Google.
3822
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003823Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003824-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003825
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003826- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3827 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3828 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3829 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3830 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3831 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3832 other platforms should do likewise.
3833
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003834- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3835 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3836 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3837
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003838C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003839-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003840
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003841- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3842 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3843 producing key-value pairs.
3844
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003845- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003846 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003847 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3848 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3849 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3850 previously went unchallenged.
3851
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003852New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003853-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003854
3855Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003856-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003857
3858Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003859-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003860
3861Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003862----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003863
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003864- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3865 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003866
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003867- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3868 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3869 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3870 home.
3871
3872
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003873What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003874===========================
3875
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003876*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3877
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003878Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003879--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003880
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003881- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3882 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003883
3884 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003885 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003886
3887 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3888 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003889 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003890 This needs to be documented.
3891
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003892- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3893 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3894
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003895- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3896 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3897 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3898
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003899- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3900 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3901
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003902- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3903 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3904 class forbids it).
3905
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003906- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3907 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3908 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3909
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003910- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3911
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003912Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003913-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003914
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003915- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3916 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003917 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003918
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003919- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3920 (like 1 + '').
3921
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003922Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003923-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003924
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003925- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3926 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3927 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3928 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003929 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003930 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3931
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003932- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3933 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3934 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3935 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3936
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003937- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3938 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003939 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3940 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3941 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003942
3943- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3944 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003945
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003946- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3947 bytes on its input.
3948
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003949Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003950-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003951
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003952- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003953 convenience function.
3954
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003955- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3956 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3957 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003958 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3959 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3960 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3961 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3962 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3963 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003964
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003965- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3966 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3967 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3968 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3969
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003970- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3971 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3972 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3973
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003974- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3975 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3976 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3977 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3978
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003979- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3980 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003981 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003982 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3983 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3984 new -l and -e options.
3985
3986- statcache is now deprecated.
3987
3988- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3989 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003990 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003991 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3992 time properly taken into account.
3993
3994- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3995 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3996 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3997 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3998
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003999Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004000-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004001
4002Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004003-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004004
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004005- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4006 is built with libdb3 if available.
4007
4008- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4009
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004010C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004011-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004012
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004013- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4014 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4015 PySequence_Size().
4016
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004017- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4018
4019- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4020 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4021 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4022
4023- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4024 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4025
4026- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4027 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4028
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004029New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004030-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004031
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004032- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4033 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4034
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004035- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4036 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4037
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004038- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4039
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004040Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004041-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004042
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004043- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4044 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4045
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004046Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004047-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004048
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004049Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004050----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004051
4052- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4053 removed completely in the next release.
4054
4055- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4056 OSX.
4057
4058- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4059 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4060
4061- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4062
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004063
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004064What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004065===========================
4066
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004067*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4068
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004069Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004070--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004071
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004072- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004073 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004074 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004075 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4076 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004077 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4078 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004079 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4080 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004081
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004082- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4083 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4084
4085- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4086 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4087
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004088Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004089-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004090
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004091- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4092 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4093 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4094 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4095 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4096 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4097 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4098 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4099
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004100- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4101 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4102 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4103 example).
4104
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004105- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004106 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004107 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004108 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004109
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004110- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4111 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4112 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004113 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004114
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004115- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4116 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4117 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4118 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4119 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4120 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4121
4122 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4123
4124 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4125
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004126Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004127-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004128
4129- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4130
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004131- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4132
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004133- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4134 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004135
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004136- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4137 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4138 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4139 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4140 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4141 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004142 attributes.
4143
4144- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4145 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4146 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004147
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004148- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4149 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4150 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004151
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004152- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4153 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4154 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004155 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4156 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4157
4158- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4159 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004160
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004161Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004162-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004163
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004164- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4165 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4166
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004167- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4168 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4169 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4170 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4171
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004172- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4173 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4174 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4175 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4176
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004177 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4178 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4179 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4180 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4181 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4182 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4183 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4184 without losing information).
4185
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004186- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004187 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4188 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4189 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4190 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4191 module).
4192
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004193 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004194 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4195 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4196 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4197 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004198
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004199- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004200 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4201 encoding.
4202
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004203- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4204 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4205
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004206- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004207 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4208
4209- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4210 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4211 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4212 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4213
4214- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4215
4216- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4217 ON, and OFF.
4218
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004219- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4220 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4221
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004222Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004223-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004224
4225- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4226 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4227 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004228
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004229- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4230 been added: -X and -E.
4231
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004232Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004233-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004234
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004235- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4236 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4237
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004238C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004239-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004240
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004241- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4242 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4243 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4244 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4245 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4246
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004247- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4248 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4249 as long) arguments.
4250
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004251- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4252 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4253 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4254 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4255 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4256 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4257
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004258- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4259 input.
4260
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004261New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004262-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004263
4264Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004265-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004266
4267Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004268-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004269
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004270- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4271 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4272 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4273
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004274- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4275 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4276 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004277 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004278
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004279 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4280 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4281 import signal
4282 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004283
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004284 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004285 while 1:
4286 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004287 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004288 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4289 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4290 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4291 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004292
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004293
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004294What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4295===========================
4296
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004297*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4298
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004299Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004300--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004301
4302- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4303 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4304 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4305
4306- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4307 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4308 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4309 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4310 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4311 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4312 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004313
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004314- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004315 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004316 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4317 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4318 associate a docstring with a property.
4319
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004320- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4321 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4322 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4323 other built-in object types.
4324
4325- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4326 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4327 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4328 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4329 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4330
4331- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4332 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4333
4334- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4335 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004336 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004337 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4338 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4339 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4340 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4341 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4342
4343- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4344 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4345 class.
4346
4347- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4348 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4349 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4350 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4351
4352- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4353 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4354 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4355 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4356
4357- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4358 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4359
4360- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4361 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4362 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4363 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4364 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004365 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004366 with the same value as s.
4367
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004368- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4369
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004370Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004371----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004372
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004373- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4374
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004375- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4376 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4377 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4378 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4379 objects.
4380
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004381- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4382 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004383 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4384 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4385
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004386- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4387 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4388 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4389
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004390Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004391-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004392
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004393- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4394 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4395 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4396 by the instances.
4397
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004398- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4399 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4400 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4401
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004402- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4403 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4404 before the entire comparison is complete.
4405
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004406- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4407 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4408 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4409
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004410- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4411 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4412 getwriter().
4413
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004414- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4415 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4416
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004417- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004418 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4419 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4420
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004421- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4422 iterable object.
4423
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004424- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4425 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004426
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004427- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4428 authentication.
4429
4430- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4431 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004432
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004433- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004434 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4435 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4436 a sample driver.)
4437
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004438Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004439-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004440
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004441- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4442 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4443 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4444 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4445 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4446 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4447 kernel has large file support.
4448
4449- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4450 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4451 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4452 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4453 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4454
4455- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4456 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4457 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4458
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004459C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004460-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004461
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004462- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4463 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4464
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004465New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004466-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004467
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004468- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4469 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4470
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004471Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004472-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004473
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004474- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4475 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4476 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4477 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4478 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4479
4480- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4481 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4482 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4483 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4484
4485- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4486 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4487
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004488Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004489-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004490
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004491- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004492 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4493 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004494
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004495
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004496What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4497===========================
4498
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004499*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4500
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004501Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004502----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004503
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004504- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4505 big to represent as a C double.
4506
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004507- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4508 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4509 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4510 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4511 restriction).
4512
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004513- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4514 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4515 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4516 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4517 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4518
4519 >>> dir([])
4520 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4521 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4522 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4523 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4524 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4525 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4526 'reverse', 'sort']
4527
4528 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4529
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004530- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004531 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4532 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4533 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4534 OverflowError exception.
4535
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004536- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004537 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004538 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4539 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4540 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4541 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4542 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004543 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004544 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4545 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4546
4547 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4548 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4549 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4550 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004551
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004552- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004553 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4554 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4555 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4556 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4557 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4558 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4559 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4560 once it is created.
4561
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004562- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4563 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4564 (key, value) pairs.
4565
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004566- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004567 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4568 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4569
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004570- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4571 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4572 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4573 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4574 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004575
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004576- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004577 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4578 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4579
4580 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4581
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004582- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004583 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4584
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004585Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004586-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004587
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004588- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004589 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4590 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004591
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004592- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4593 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4594 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4595 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4596 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4597 in this area anymore).
4598
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004599- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4600 threading.Timer.
4601
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004602- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4603 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4604
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004605- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004606 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4607
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004608- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004609 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4610 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4611 converted to Python longs.
4612
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004613- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004614 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4615
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004616- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4617 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4618 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4619
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004620Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004621-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004622
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004623- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4624 division operators as per PEP 238.
4625
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004626Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004627-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004628
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004629- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4630 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4631 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4632 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4633
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004634C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004635-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004636
4637- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004638
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004639- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4640 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004641 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004642
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004643 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4644 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004645 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004646 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004647
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004648- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004649 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4650 module:
4651
4652 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004653
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004654 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4655 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004656
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004657 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4658 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004659
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004660 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4661
4662 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4663
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004664- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004665 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4666 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4667 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004668
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004669New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004670-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004671
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004672- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4673 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4674 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4675 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4676 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004677
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004678Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004679-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004680
4681Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004682-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004683
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004684- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4685 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4686 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4687 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004688 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4689 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4690 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4691 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4692 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004693
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004694- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004695 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4696
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004697
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004698What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4699===========================
4700
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004701*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4702
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004703Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004704-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004705
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004706- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4707 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4708
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004709- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4710 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4711 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004712
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004713- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4714 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4715 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4716 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004717
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004718- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4719
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004720- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004721
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004722Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004723-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004724
4725- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004726 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004727 the module docstring for details.
4728
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004729Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004730-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004731
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004732- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004733 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4734 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4735 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004736
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004737- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4738 Nick Mathewson.
4739
4740Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004741----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004742
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004743- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4744 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4745 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4746 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4747 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4748 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4749 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4750 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4751
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004752- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4753 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4754 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4755 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4756
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004757- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4758 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4759 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4760 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4761 come a long way).
4762
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004763- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4764 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4765 write filters for these warnings).
4766
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004767- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4768 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4769 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4770 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4771 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4772
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004773- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4774 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4775 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4776 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4777 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4778 older distribution.
4779
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004780Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004781-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004782
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004783- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4784 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004785 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004786
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004787- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4788 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4789 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4790
4791- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4792
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004793- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4794
4795- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4796
4797- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4798
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004799- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004800
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004801- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4802
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004803New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004804-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004805
4806C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004807-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004808
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004809- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4810 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4811 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4812 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4813 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4814 against buffer overruns.
4815
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004816- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004817 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4818 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004819 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4820 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4821 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4822
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004823- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4824 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4825 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4826 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4827 deprecated.
4828
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004829Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004830-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004831
4832- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4833 relevant is found.
4834
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004835
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004836What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004837===========================
4838
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004839*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4840
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004841Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004842----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004843
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004844- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4845 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4846 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4847 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4848 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4849 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4850 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4851 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004852 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004853 repaired.
4854
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004855- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004856 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004857 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4858 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4859 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4860 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4861 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4862 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4863 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4864 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4865
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004866- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4867 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4868 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4869 leading BMO character).
4870
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004871- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4872 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4873 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4874
4875 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4876 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4877 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004878
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004879 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4880 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4881 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4882 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4883 for various simple to use conversions.
4884
4885 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4886 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4887
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004888 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4889 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4890 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4891 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4892 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4893 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4894 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4895 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4896 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4897 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4898 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4899 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4900 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4901 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4902 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004903
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004904- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4905 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4906 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004907 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004908 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004909
4910 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004911 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4912 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4913 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4914 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4915 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004916 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4917 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004918
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004919 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4920 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4921 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004922 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004923
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004924- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4925 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4926 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4927 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4928 floating arithmetic,
4929
4930 x = 9007199254740992.0
4931 print long(x)
4932
4933 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4934 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4935 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4936 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4937 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4938 functions are of good quality).
4939
4940 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4941 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4942 algorithms to break.
4943
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004944- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4945 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4946 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4947 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4948 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4949 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4950 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4951 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4952 order.
4953
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004954- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4955 operation along the most common code paths.
4956
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004957- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4958 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4959
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004960- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4961 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4962 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4963 {}.update(UserDict())
4964
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004965- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4966 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4967 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4968 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4969 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4970 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4971 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4972 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4973
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004974- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004975 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004976
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004977 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004978 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4979 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004980 join() method of strings
4981 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004982 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4983 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004984 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004985 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004986
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004987- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4988 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4989
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004990- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4991 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4992
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004993- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4994 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4995 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4996 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4997
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004998- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4999 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005000 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005001 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5002 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005003
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005004- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5005
5006
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005007Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005008-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005009
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005010- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005011 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005012 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5013 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5014
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005015- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5016 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5017
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005018- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5019 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5020 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5021 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5022
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005023- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5024 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5025 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5026
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005027- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5028
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005029- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5030
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005031- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5032 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5033 that are still imported into string.py).
5034
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005035- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5036
5037- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5038 Now it does.
5039
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005040- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5041
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005042- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5043 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5044 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5045 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5046 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005047 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5048 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005049
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005050- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5051 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5052 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5053 'help(object)'.
5054
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005055Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005056-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005057
5058- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005059 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005060 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5061 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5062
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005063- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005064 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5065 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005066
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005067C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005068-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005069
5070- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5071 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005072
5073----
5074
5075**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**