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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
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: DD-MMM-YYYY*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +000015- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
16 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
17 cases.
18
19- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
20 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
21 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
22 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
23 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
24 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
25 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
26 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
27 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
28 a release build.
29
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +000030- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
31 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
32
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000033- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +000034 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +000035
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +000036- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
37 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
38 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
39 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
40 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
41 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
42 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
43 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
44 destroyed.
45
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +000046- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
47 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
48 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
49 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
50 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
51 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
52 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
53 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
54
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +000055- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
56 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
57 character other than a space.
58
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +000059- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
60 by the function object or by the method object, the function
61 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
62 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
63 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
64 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
65 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
66 attributes with the same name.
67
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000068- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
69 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
70 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
71 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
72 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
73 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
74 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
75 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
76 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
77 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
78 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
79 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
80 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
81 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +000082
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +000083- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
84 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
85 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
86 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
87 This has been repaired.
88
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +000089- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
90
91- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
92
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +000093- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
94 over a sequence.
95
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +000096- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
97 from any iterable.
98
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +000099- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
100
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000101- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
102 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
103 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
104 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
105 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
106 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
107 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
108 records with equal keys is unchanged).
109
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000110- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
111 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
112 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
113
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000114- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
115 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
116 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
117 freelist.
118
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000119- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
120 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
121
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000122- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
123 number.
124
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000125- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
126 a TypeError exception.
127
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000128- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
129 820195.
130
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000131- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
132 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
133 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
134
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000135- str and unicode builtin types now have rsplit() method that is
136 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
137 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000138
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000139- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
140 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
141 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
142
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000143Extension modules
144-----------------
145
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000146- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
147 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
148
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000149- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
150 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
151 and pops on either side of the deque.
152
153- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
154 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
155
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000156- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
157 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
158 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
159 other functions that expect a function argument.
160
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000161- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
162
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000163- os.getsid was added.
164
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000165- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
166 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
167 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
168
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000169- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
170
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000171- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
172
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000173- readline.clear_history was added.
174
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000175- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
176
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000177- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
178
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000179- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
180
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000181- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
182
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000183- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
184
185- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
186
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000187- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
188
189- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
190
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000191- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
192 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
193 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
194
195- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
196 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
197 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
198 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
199 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
200 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
201 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
202
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000203- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
204 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
205 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
206 the Unix uniq filter.
207
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000208- itertools now has a new function, tee() which produces two independent
209 iterators from a single iterable.
210
211- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
212 of raising a TypeError exception.
213
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000214Library
215-------
216
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000217- The encodings package will now applies codec name aliases
218 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
219 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
220 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
221 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
222 accordingly.
223
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000224- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
225 decoding standards.
226
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000227- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
228 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
229 called for all requests.
230
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000231- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
232 they are passed to the compiler.
233
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000234- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
235 indent, width and depth.
236
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000237- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
238 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
239
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000240- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
241 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
242
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000243- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
244
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000245- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
246
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000247- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
248
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000249- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
250 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
251
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000252- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
253 for better performance
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000254
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000255- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
256 a string).
257
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000258- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
259
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000260- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
261
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000262- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
263
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000264- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
265
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000266- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
267 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
268 list of fieldnames.
269
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000270- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
271 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
272
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000273- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
274
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000275- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
276 empty lists.
277
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000278- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
279 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
280 and shelves.
281
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000282- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
283 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
284
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000285- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000286 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
287 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000288
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000289- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
290 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000291 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000292
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000293- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000294 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
295 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
296
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000297- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
298 and removed in Py2.4.
299
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000300- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
301
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000302- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
303
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000304Tools/Demos
305-----------
306
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000307- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
308 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
309
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000310- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
311
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000312- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
313 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
314 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
315 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
316
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000317- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
318
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000319- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
320 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
321 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
322 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
323 now.
324
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000325- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
326 in effect
327
328- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
329 C-c C-h
330
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000331- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
332 -d option was given.
333
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000334Build
335-----
336
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000337- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
338 supported (see PEP 11).
339
340- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
341
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000342- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
343
344- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
345 (see PEP 11).
346
347- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
348 sizeof(char) must be 1.
349
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000350C API
351-----
352
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000353- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
354 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
355 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
356 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
357 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
358
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000359- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
360 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
361 about 10% faster.
362
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000363- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
364 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
365
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000366- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
367 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
368 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
369 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
370
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000371New platforms
372-------------
373
374Tests
375-----
376
377Windows
378-------
379
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000380- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
381 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
382 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
383 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
384
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000385- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
386 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
387 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
388
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000389Mac
390----
391
392
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000393What's New in Python 2.3 final?
394===============================
395
396*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
397
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000398IDLE
399----
400
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000401- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
402 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
403 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
404 context-menu actions.
405
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000406- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
407 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
408 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
409 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
410 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
411 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
412 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
413 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
414 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
415
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000416
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000417What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
418=============================================
419
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000420*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000421
422Core and builtins
423-----------------
424
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000425- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000426 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000427 comment at the end are still unsupported.
428
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000429Extension modules
430-----------------
431
432- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
433 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
434 than once. This has been fixed.
435
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000436- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
437 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
438 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
439 call.
440
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000441- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
442
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000443Library
444-------
445
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000446- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
447 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
448
449- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
450 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
451 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
452 restored.
453
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000454IDLE
455----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000456
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000457- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000458
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000459Build
460-----
461
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000462- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
463 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
464
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000465C API
466-----
467
468Windows
469-------
470
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000471- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
472 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
473
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000474- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
475
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000476Mac
477---
478
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000479- Various fixes to pimp.
480
481- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
482
483- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
484 more problems than it solves.
485
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000486
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000487What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
488=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000489
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000490*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
491
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000492Core and builtins
493-----------------
494
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000495- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
496 by sys.setcheckinterval().
497
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000498- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
499 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000500 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000501
502- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
503 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
504 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000505 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000506
507- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
508 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000509
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000510- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
511 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
512 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
513
514- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000515 770247.
516
517- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000518
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000519Extension modules
520-----------------
521
522- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
523 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
524
525- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
526
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000527- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
528
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000529- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
530 contained within the _strptime module.
531
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000532- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
533 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
534
535- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000536 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
537
538- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
539 the find_class attribute, if present.
540
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000541- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000542
543 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
544 (SF bug 763298).
545
546 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000547 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
548 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
549 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000550
551 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
552
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000553Library
554-------
555
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000556- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
557
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000558- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
559 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
560 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
561 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
562 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
563 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
564 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
565 or Tester().
566
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000567- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
568 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
569 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
570 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
571 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
572 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
573 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
574 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
575 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000576
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000577 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000578
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000579- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
580 weren't before was an oversight.
581
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000582- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
583 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
584
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000585- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
586 when there are no lines.
587
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000588- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
589 which could occur with Tk 8.4
590
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000591- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
592 to child processes.
593
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000594- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
595
596- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
597
598- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
599 xmlrpclib.
600
601- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
602 responses.
603
604- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
605 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
606
607- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
608 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
609 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
610
611- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
612 used as patterns.
613
614- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
615 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
616 than Tk 8.3.
617
618- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
619
620- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000621
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000622Tools/Demos
623-----------
624
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000625- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
626
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +0000627- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
628
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000629- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000630
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000631Build
632-----
633
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000634- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
635
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000636- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
637
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000638- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
639 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000640
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000641- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
642 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
643 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000644
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000645C API
646-----
647
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000648- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
649 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
650
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000651Windows
652-------
653
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000654- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
655 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
656 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
657 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
658 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
659 Python exception ::
660
661 thread.error: can't start new thread
662
663 is raised now.
664
665- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
666 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
667 instead of from DLL teardown.
668
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000669Mac
670---
671
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000672- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +0000673 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000674 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
675 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
676 the executable in the bundle.
677
678- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000679
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +0000680- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
681
682- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
683 on Panther.
684
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000685What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
686================================
687
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000688*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000689
690Core and builtins
691-----------------
692
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +0000693- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
694 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
695 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
696 with the -i option.
697
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +0000698- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
699 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
700
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000701- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
702 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
703
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +0000704- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
705 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
706 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
707 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
708 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
709 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
710 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
711 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
712 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
713 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
714 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
715 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
716 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +0000717
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000718- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
719 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
720 embedded in a lambda expression.
721
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +0000722- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
723 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
724 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
725 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
726 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
727
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000728- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
729 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
730 matches the restriction on classic classes.
731
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +0000732- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
733 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
734
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +0000735- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
736 It's writable again.
737
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000738- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
739 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
740 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000741 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +0000742
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000743- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
744 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
745 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
746
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000747Extension modules
748-----------------
749
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +0000750- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
751 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
752
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000753- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
754 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
755 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
756 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
757
758- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
759 collection.
760
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +0000761- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
762 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
763 unique within a single program run.
764
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +0000765- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
766 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
767
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +0000768- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
769 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
770
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +0000771- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
772 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +0000773
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +0000774- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
775
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +0000776- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
777 Fixes SF bug #730685.
778
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +0000779- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
780 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
781 for many BSD-derived systems.
782
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000783
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000784Library
785-------
786
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +0000787- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
788 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
789 primary ones:
790
791 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
792 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
793 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
794
795 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
796 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
797 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
798 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
799 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
800 framework features (which doctest lacks).
801
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +0000802- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
803 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
804 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
805 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
806 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
807 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
808 argument.
809
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000810- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
811 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
812 in the archive.
813
814- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
815 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
816
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +0000817- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
818 569574).
819
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000820- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
821 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
822 no more.
823
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000824- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
825 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
826 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
827 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
828 code coverage.
829
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000830- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
831 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
832 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +0000833 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
834 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +0000835
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000836- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
837 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
838 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +0000839 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +0000840
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +0000841- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
842
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +0000843- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
844 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
845 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
846 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
847
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +0000848- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
849 handling.
850
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +0000851- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
852 __doc__ of data descriptors.
853
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +0000854- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
855 in socket.py.
856
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +0000857- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
858
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +0000859- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
860 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
861 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
862 opener with proxy support.
863
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000864- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
865
866- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
867
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000868Tools/Demos
869-----------
870
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +0000871- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
872
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +0000873- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
874
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +0000875- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
876 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +0000877
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +0000878- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
879 files.
880
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000881Build
882-----
883
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000884- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +0000885 different root directory.
886
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000887C API
888-----
889
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +0000890- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
891 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
892 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
893 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
894 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
895 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
896 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
897 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
898 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
899 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
900
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000901- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
902 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
903 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
904 from Python.
905
906
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000907New platforms
908-------------
909
910None this time.
911
912Tests
913-----
914
915- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
916 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
917
918Windows
919-------
920
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +0000921- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
922
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +0000923- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
924 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
925 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
926 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
927 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
928 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
929 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
930 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
931 that's what it's for.
932
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000933Mac
934---
935
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +0000936- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
937 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
938 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
939 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +0000940- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
941 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
942- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +0000943
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +0000944SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
945------------------------------------
946
947430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
948598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
949622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
950661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
951683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
952697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
953713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
954724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
955727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
956729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
957730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
958731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
959732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
960733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
961735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
962740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
963744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
964745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
965747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
966749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
967751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
968753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
969755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
970757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
971760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
972
973
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000974What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
975================================
976
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +0000977*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +0000978
979Core and builtins
980-----------------
981
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +0000982- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
983 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
984
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +0000985- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
986 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
987 and cannot be strings).
988
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +0000989- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
990 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
991 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
992 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
993
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +0000994- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
995 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
996 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
997 Python itself.
998
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +0000999- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1000 the referenced object, if it has one.
1001
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001002- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1003 the thread started at
1004 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1005
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001006- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1007 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1008 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1009 placed on a list index.
1010
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001011- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1012 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1013 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1014 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1015
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001016- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1017 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1018 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1019 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1020 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1021 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1022 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1023
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001024- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1025 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1026 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1027 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1028 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1029
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001030- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1031 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001032
1033- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1034 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1035 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1036 #693195.)
1037
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001038- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1039 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001040
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001041- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001042 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001043 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1044 interpreter executions, would fail.
1045
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001046- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001047 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001048 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001049
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001050Extension modules
1051-----------------
1052
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001053- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1054 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1055 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1056 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1057
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001058- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1059 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1060
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001061- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1062 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1063 and Greg Chapman.)
1064
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001065- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1066 recursively.
1067
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001068- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001069 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1070 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1071 leaks.
1072
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001073- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1074
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001075- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1076 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1077 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1078 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1079 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1080 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1081 #705836.
1082
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001083- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001084 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1085
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001086- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1087 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1088 See SF bug #692416.
1089
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001090- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1091 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1092
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001093- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1094 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1095 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001096
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001097- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001098 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1099 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1100
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001101- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1102 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1103 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1104 timeouts to work properly.
1105
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001106Library
1107-------
1108
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001109- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1110 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1111 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1112 future release.
1113
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001114- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1115 for querying platform dependent features.
1116
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001117- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001118
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001119- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1120 pickle protocol versions.
1121
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001122- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1123 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1124 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1125
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001126- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1127
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001128- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1129 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1130 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1131 modules.
1132
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001133- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1134 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1135 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1136
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001137- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1138 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1139
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001140- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1141 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1142 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1143
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001144- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001145 MS Office extensions.
1146
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001147- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1148 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1149
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001150- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1151 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1152
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001153- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1154 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1155 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1156 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1157 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1158 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1159
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001160- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1161 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1162 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001163
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001164- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1165 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1166 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1167
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001168- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1169
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001170- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1171 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1172 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1173
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001174Tools/Demos
1175-----------
1176
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001177- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1178 See the module docstring for details.
1179
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001180Build
1181-----
1182
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001183- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1184 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001185
1186C API
1187-----
1188
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001189- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1190
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001191- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1192 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1193 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1194
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001195- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1196 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001197
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001198 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1199 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1200 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001201
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001202- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001203 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1204
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001205- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1206 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1207 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001208
1209New platforms
1210-------------
1211
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001212None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001213
1214Tests
1215-----
1216
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001217- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1218 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001219
1220Windows
1221-------
1222
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001223- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1224 function.
1225
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001226- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1227 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001228
1229Mac
1230---
1231
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001232- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1233 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001234
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001235- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1236 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001237
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001238- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1239 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1240 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001241
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001242- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001243 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1244 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001245
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001246- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1247 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001248
1249
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001250What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1251=================================
1252
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001253*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001254
1255Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001256-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001257
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001258- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1259 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1260 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1261
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001262- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1263 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1264 (SF patch #664376.)
1265
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001266- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1267 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1268 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1269 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1270 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1271 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001272 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001273
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001274- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1275 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1276 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1277 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001278 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001279
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001280- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1281 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1282 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1283 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1284 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1285 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1286 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1287 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1288 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1289 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1290 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1291
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001292- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1293 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1294 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1295 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1296 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1297 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1298
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001299- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1300 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1301
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001302- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1303 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1304 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1305 case.)
1306
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001307- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1308 passed as unicode strings.
1309
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001310- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1311 See SF bug #683467.
1312
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001313- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1314 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1315
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001316- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1317
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001318- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1319
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001320- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1321 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1322 arguments.
1323
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001324- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1325 See SF bug #667147.
1326
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001327- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001328 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001329 See SF bug #676155.
1330
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001331- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001332 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001333 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1334 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1335 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1336 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1337 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1338 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001339
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001340Extension modules
1341-----------------
1342
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001343- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1344 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1345 tp_as_number pointer.
1346
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001347- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1348 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1349 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1350 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1351 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1352
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001353- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1354
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001355- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1356
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001357- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001358 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001359 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1360 patch #678531.)
1361
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001362- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1363 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1364
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001365- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1366 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1367
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001368- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1369
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001370- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1371 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1372 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1373
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001374- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1375
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001376- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1377 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1378
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001379- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001380
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001381- datetime changes:
1382
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001383 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1384
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001385 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1386 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1387 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1388 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1389 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1390 now.
1391
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001392 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001393 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1394 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001395
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001396 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001397 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001398 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1399 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1400 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1401 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001402
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001403 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1404 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1405 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001406 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1407
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001408 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1409 by a later example coded by Guido.
1410
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001411 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001412 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1413 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1414 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001415 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1416 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1417
1418 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1419 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1420 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1421 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1422 tzinfo subclass instance.
1423
1424 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1425 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1426 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1427 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1428 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1429 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1430 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1431 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001432
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001433 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1434 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1435 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1436 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1437 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001438 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1439
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001440 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001441
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001442 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1443 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1444 as a naive datetime object.
1445
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001446 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1447 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1448 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1449
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001450 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1451 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1452 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1453 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1454 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1455 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1456 comparison.
1457
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001458 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1459 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1460 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1461 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001462 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001463
1464 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001465
1466 and ::
1467
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001468 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1469
1470 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1471 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1472 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1473 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1474
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001475 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1476 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1477 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1478 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1479 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1480
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001481 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1482 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001483 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1484 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001485
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001486Library
1487-------
1488
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001489- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1490 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1491
1492- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1493 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1494 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1495 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1496 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1497 See PEP 307 for details.
1498
1499- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1500 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1501
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001502- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1503 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001504 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001505 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1506 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001507 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001508
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001509- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1510 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1511
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001512- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1513 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1514 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1515
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001516- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1517
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001518- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1519 exception.
1520
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001521- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1522 class.
1523
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001524- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1525 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1526 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1527
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001528- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1529 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1530
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001531- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001532 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1533 See SF bug #659228.
1534
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001535- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1536 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1537 See SF patch #651082.
1538
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001539- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001540
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001541- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1542 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1543
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001544- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001545 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001546
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001547- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1548 DOS paths from other platforms.
1549
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001550Tools/Demos
1551-----------
1552
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001553- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1554 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1555 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1556 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1557 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1558 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1559 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1560 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1561 example:
1562
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001563 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1564 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001565
1566 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1567
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001568
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001569Build
1570-----
1571
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001572- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1573 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1574 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001575 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1576
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001577 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1578
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001579- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1580 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1581 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1582 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1583 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1584 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1585 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1586 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1587 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1588
1589- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1590 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1591 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1592 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1593
1594- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1595 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1596
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001597C API
1598-----
1599
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001600- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1601 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001602
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001603- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1604 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1605 tp_as_number pointer.
1606
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001607- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1608 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1609 (SF #681367)
1610
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00001611- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
1612 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
1613 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
1614 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00001615
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001616Tests
1617-----
1618
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00001619- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001620 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
1621 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
1622 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
1623 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
1624 pydoc.)
1625
1626- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
1627
1628- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001629
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001630Windows
1631-------
1632
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001633- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
1634 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
1635 time).
1636
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00001637- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
1638 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
1639
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001640- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
1641 release without strong cryptography.
1642
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001643- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001644 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00001645
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001646- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
1647 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
1648
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001649Mac
1650---
1651
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001652- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
1653 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001654
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00001655- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
1656 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
1657 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001658
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00001659- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
1660 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001661
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001662- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
1663 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
1664 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
1665 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001666
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00001667- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00001668 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
1669 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
1670 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001671
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001672
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001673What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001674=================================
1675
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00001676*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001677
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001678Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001679--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001680
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00001681- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
1682
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001683- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
1684 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001685 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00001686 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00001687 a different meaning than before.
1688
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001689- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001690 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00001691 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001692
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00001693- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001694 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001695 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00001696
1697- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
1698 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
1699 and deallocation.
1700
1701- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
1702 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
1703
1704- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
1705 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
1706 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
1707 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
1708 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
1709
1710- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
1711 now detected by the garbage collector.
1712
1713- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
1714 [SF bug 519621]
1715
1716- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
1717 identifier.
1718
1719- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
1720 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
1721 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
1722 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
1723 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
1724 [SF bug 563060]
1725
1726- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
1727 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
1728 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
1729 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
1730 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
1731
1732- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
1733 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
1734 not called. [SF bug #537450]
1735
1736- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
1737
1738- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
1739 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
1740 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
1741 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
1742 state of the slots would be lost.)
1743
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001744Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001745-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001746
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001747- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001748 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
1749 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
1750 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
1751 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00001752 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
1753 Jython 2.1.
1754
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001755- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001756 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00001757 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
1758 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
1759 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
1760 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
1761 these, see PEP 302.
1762
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001763- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
1764 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
1765 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
1766
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00001767- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
1768 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
1769 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
1770
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00001771- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
1772 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
1773 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
1774
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00001775- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
1776 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
1777 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
1778 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
1779 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
1780 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
1781 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
1782 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
1783 releases or implementations.
1784
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001785- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001786 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
1787 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00001788
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00001789- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
1790 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
1791
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001792- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
1793 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
1794 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
1795
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00001796- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
1797 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
1798
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001799- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
1800 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00001801 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
1802 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00001803
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00001804- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
1805 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
1806 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
1807 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
1808 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
1809
1810 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
1811 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
1812 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
1813 pattern.
1814
1815 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
1816 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
1817 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
1818 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
1819
1820 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
1821 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
1822 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
1823 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
1824 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
1825 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
1826
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00001827- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
1828 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
1829 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
1830 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
1831 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
1832 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
1833 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
1834 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00001835
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00001836- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
1837 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
1838 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
1839 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
1840 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00001841 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
1842 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
1843 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
1844 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
1845 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
1846 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
1847 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001848
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001849- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
1850 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
1851
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00001852- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
1853 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
1854 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
1855 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
1856 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
1857 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
1858 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
1859 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
1860 to Zack Weinberg!
1861
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00001862- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
1863 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
1864 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
1865 type. This has been fixed now.
1866
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00001867- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
1868 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
1869 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
1870
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001871- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
1872 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
1873 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
1874 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
1875 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
1876 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
1877 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
1878 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00001879 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00001880
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00001881- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
1882 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
1883 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00001884
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001885- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
1886 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
1887 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
1888 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
1889 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
1890 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
1891 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
1892 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001893 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00001894 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
1895 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
1896
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00001897- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
1898 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
1899 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
1900 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
1901 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
1902 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
1903 this.)
1904
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001905- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
1906 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001907 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001908 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00001909 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
1910 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00001911 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
1912 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00001913
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00001914- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
1915 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
1916 currently running.
1917
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00001918- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
1919 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
1920 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
1921 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
1922
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00001923- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
1924 as directory names.
1925
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00001926- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
1927 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
1928
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00001929- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
1930 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
1931
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001932- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00001933 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
1934 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00001935
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00001936- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
1937 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
1938 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
1939 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
1940 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
1941
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001942- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
1943 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
1944 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
1945 removed.
1946
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00001947- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
1948 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
1949 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
1950
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00001951- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
1952 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
1953 to __debug__.
1954
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00001955- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
1956 string to the left with zeros. For example,
1957 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
1958
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00001959- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
1960 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
1961 deprecated now.
1962
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00001963- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
1964 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
1965 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00001966
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00001967- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
1968 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
1969 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
1970 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
1971 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00001972
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00001973- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
1974 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
1975
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001976- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
1977 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
1978 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001979 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00001980 is backward compatible.
1981
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00001982- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
1983 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
1984 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
1985 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
1986 could access a pointer to freed memory.
1987
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00001988- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
1989 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
1990 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
1991 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
1992 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
1993 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001994
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00001995- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
1996 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
1997
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001998- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
1999 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2000
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002001- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2002 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2003 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2004 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2005 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2006
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002007- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2008 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2009 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2010
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002011- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002012 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2013
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002014- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2015 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2016 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002017
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002018- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2019 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2020
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002021- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2022 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2023 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2024
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002025- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2026
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002027Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002028-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002029
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002030- Added three operators to the operator module:
2031 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2032 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2033 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2034
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002035- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2036
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002037- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2038 archives.
2039
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002040- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2041 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2042 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2043
2044 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2045
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002046- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2047 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2048 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002049 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002050
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002051- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2052 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2053 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2054 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002055 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2056 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2057 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2058 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002059
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002060- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2061 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002062
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002063- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2064
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002065- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2066 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2067
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002068- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2069 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2070 supported.
2071
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002072- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2073
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002074- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2075 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002076
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002077- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2078 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2079
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002080- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2081
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002082- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2083 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2084
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002085- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2086 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2087 functions but callable type objects.
2088
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002089- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002090 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002091 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002092
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002093- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2094 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002095
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002096- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2097 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002098
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002099- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2100 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2101 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2102 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2103
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002104- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2105 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002106
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002107- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2108 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2109 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2110 and __imul__.
2111
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002112- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002113 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2114 is called.
2115
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002116- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2117 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2118 interpreter was compiled.
2119
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002120- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2121 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2122 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002123 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002124 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2125 1, not 2.
2126
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002127- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2128 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2129 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2130 limit.
2131
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002132- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2133 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2134 bug #623464.
2135
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002136- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2137 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2138 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2139 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2140
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002141Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002142-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002143
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002144- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2145
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002146- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2147 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2148 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2149 with Python 2.3a2.
2150
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002151- os.path exposes getctime.
2152
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002153- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002154 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002155 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002156 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002157 unit tests of floating point results.
2158
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002159- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2160 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2161 has been increased.
2162
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002163- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2164 executed.
2165
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002166- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2167 postinstallation script.
2168
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002169- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2170 test the current module.
2171
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002172- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002173 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2174 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2175 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2176 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2177
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002178- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002179 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002180 Ward's Optik package.
2181
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002182- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2183 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2184 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2185 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2186
2187- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2188 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002189 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002190
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002191- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2192 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2193 shelf are binary pickles.
2194
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002195- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2196 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2197
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002198- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2199 modules are iterators now.
2200
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002201- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2202 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2203 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2204 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2205 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2206 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002207
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002208- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2209 with their entity value.
2210
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002211- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2212
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002213- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2214 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002215
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002216- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2217 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002218 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002219
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002220- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2221 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2222 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2223 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2224 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2225 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2226 main():
2227
2228 import locale
2229 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2230
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002231- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2232 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2233
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002234- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2235 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2236 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2237 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2238 to the new standard.
2239
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002240- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2241 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2242 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2243 an extension to the database.
2244
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002245- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2246 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2247 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2248 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002249 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002250
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002251- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002252 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002253
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002254- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2255 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2256 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2257 bounded integers.
2258
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002259- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2260 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2261 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2262 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2263 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2264 in existence.
2265
2266 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2267 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2268 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2269 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2270 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2271 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2272
2273 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2274 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2275 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2276 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2277
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002278- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2279 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2280 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2281
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002282- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2283
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002284- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2285 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2286 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2287 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2288
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002289- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2290 argument.
2291
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002292- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2293 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2294 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2295 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2296 [SF patch 560794].
2297
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002298- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2299 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2300 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002301 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2302 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2303 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002304
2305- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2306 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002307
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002308- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2309 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2310 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2311 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002312
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002313- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2314 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2315 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2316 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2317 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2318
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002319- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002320
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002321- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2322
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002323- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2324 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2325 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2326 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2327 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2328 identical to None.
2329
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002330- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2331 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2332 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2333 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2334 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2335 results now.
2336
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002337- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2338 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2339
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002340- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2341 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2342 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2343 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2344 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2345 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2346 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2347 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2348
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002349- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2350
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002351- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2352 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2353
2354- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2355 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2356 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2357 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2358 and other systems.
2359
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002360- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2361 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2362 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2363 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 +00002364 work well with these.
2365
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002366- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2367
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002368- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002369 connections.
2370
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002371- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2372 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2373 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2374
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002375- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2376 sets
2377
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002378- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2379 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2380 name.
2381
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002382- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2383 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2384 passed in.
2385
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002386- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002387 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002388 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2389 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002390
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002391- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2392
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002393- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2394
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002395- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2396 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2397 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2398
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002399- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2400 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2401 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2402 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002403 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002404
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002405- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002406 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002407 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002408
2409- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2410 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2411 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2412
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002413- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002414 the value of its expression argument.
2415
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002416- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2417 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2418 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2419
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002420- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2421 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2422 skipstone browser was included.
2423
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002424- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2425 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2426
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002427Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002428-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002429
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002430- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2431 names in addition to accepting file names.
2432
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002433- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2434 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2435 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2436 still used and useful.)
2437
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002438- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2439 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2440 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2441 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002442
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002443- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2444 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2445 the generated binary.
2446
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002447Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002448-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002449
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002450- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2451
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002452- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2453 except in the hands of experts.
2454
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002455- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002456 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2457 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2458 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002459
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002460- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2461 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2462 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2463 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2464 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2465 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2466 builds.
2467
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002468- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2469 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2470 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2471 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2472 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2473 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2474 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2475 new type.
2476
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002477- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002478
2479 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2480 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2481 positive infinities.
2482
2483 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2484 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2485 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2486 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2487 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2488 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2489 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2490
2491 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2492
2493 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2494
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002495- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2496 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2497 size of the executable.
2498
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002499- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2500 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2501 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2502 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002503
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002504- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2505
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002506- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2507 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2508 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002509
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002510- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2511 well as Unix.
2512
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002513- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2514 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2515 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2516 modules in the README file for details.
2517
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002518C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002519-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002520
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002521- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2522 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002523 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002524 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002525 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002526
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002527- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2528 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2529 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2530 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2531 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2532 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002533 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002534 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2535 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2536 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2537 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2538 aligned.)
2539
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002540- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2541 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2542 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2543
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002544- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2545 level.
2546
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002547- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2548 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2549 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2550 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2551 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2552
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002553- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2554 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2555 code.
2556
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002557- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2558 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2559 adjusting for negative indices.
2560
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002561- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2562 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2563 object.
2564
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002565- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2566 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2567 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2568
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002569- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2570 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002571
2572- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2573
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002574- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2575 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2576 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2577 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2578
2579- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2580
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002581- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002582
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002583- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002584 without going through the buffer API.
2585
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002586- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002587
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002588- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2589 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2590 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2591 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2592
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002593- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2594 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2595
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002596- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002597 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2598
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002599New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002600-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002601
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002602- OpenVMS is now supported.
2603
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002604- AtheOS is now supported.
2605
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002606- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2607
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002608- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2609
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002610Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002611-----
2612
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00002613- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
2614 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
2615 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002616
2617Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002618-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002619
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002620- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
2621 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
2622 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
2623 bugs.
2624 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002625 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00002626 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
2627 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002628 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002629
2630- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00002631 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00002632
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00002633- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
2634 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
2635
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002636- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
2637 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002638 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00002639 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
2640
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00002641- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
2642 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
2643 use files" uninstall option).
2644
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00002645- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
2646
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002647- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
2648 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
2649
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002650- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
2651 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
2652 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
2653
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002654- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
2655 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
2656 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
2657 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
2658 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00002659 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
2660 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
2661 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00002662
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002663- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002664 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002665 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
2666 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
2667 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
2668 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
2669 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
2670 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
2671 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
2672 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
2673 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
2674 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
2675 work around.
2676
2677- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
2678 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
2679 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
2680 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
2681 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
2682 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
2683 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
2684 specified with O_CREAT too).
2685
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002686Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002687----
2688
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002689- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002690
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00002691- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
2692 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
2693 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
2694
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002695- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
2696 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
2697 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
2698
2699- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
2700 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
2701 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
2702 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
2703 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
2704 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
2705 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
2706 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002707
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00002708- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
2709 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
2710 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002711
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002712- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
2713 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
2714 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
2715 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
2716 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002717
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002718- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
2719 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
2720 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002721
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002722- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
2723 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002724
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002725- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
2726 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
2727 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
2728 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
2729 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002730
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002731- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
2732 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
2733 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
2734
2735- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
2736 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
2737 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002738
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002739- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
2740 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
2741 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
2742 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002743 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002744
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002745- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
2746 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002747
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00002748- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
2749 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002750
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002751- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00002752 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00002753 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
2754 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002755
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002756
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002757What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002758===============================
2759
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002760*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
2761
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002762Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002763--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002764
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002765- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
2766 with a custom metaclass.
2767
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002768Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002769-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002770
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002771- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
2772 are proxies.
2773
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002774Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002775-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002776
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002777- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
2778 very short strings.
2779
2780- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
2781 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
2782 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
2783 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
2784 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
2785
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002786Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002787-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002788
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002789- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
2790 close or delete time).
2791
2792- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
2793 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
2794
2795- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
2796
2797- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002798 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002799
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002800Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002801-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002802
2803Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002804-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002805
2806C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002807-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002808
2809New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002810-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002811
2812Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002813-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002814
2815Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002816-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002817
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002818- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
2819
2820- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
2821 instances are deleted at process exit time.
2822
2823- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
2824 deleted at process exit time.
2825
2826- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
2827 in backslash.
2828
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002829Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002830----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002831
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00002832- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
2833 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
2834 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
2835
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00002836
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00002837What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002838===========================
2839
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002840*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
2841
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002842Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002843--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002844
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002845- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
2846 been extensively updated. See
2847
2848 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
2849
2850 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
2851
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00002852- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
2853 deleted!
2854
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00002855- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
2856 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
2857 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
2858 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
2859 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
2860
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002861- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
2862
2863 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
2864 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
2865
2866 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
2867 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
2868 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
2869 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
2870 supported anyway.
2871
2872 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
2873 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
2874
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00002875- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
2876 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
2877 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
2878 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
2879 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00002880
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00002881- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
2882 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
2883 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
2884
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002885Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002886-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002887
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002888- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
2889 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
2890 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
2891 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
2892 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
2893 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00002894 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
2895 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
2896 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
2897 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002898
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00002899- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
2900 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
2901 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
2902
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002903Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002904-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002905
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002906- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
2907
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002908Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002909-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002910
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00002911- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
2912 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
2913 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
2914 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
2915 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
2916 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
2917
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00002918- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
2919
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00002920- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
2921
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00002922- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
2923
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002924- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
2925 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
2926 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
2927
2928- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
2929
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002930Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002931-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002932
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002933- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
2934 off a search on Google.
2935
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002936Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002937-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002938
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002939- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
2940 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
2941 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
2942 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
2943 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
2944 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
2945 other platforms should do likewise.
2946
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00002947- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
2948 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
2949 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
2950
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002951C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002952-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002953
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002954- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
2955 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
2956 producing key-value pairs.
2957
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002958- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00002959 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00002960 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
2961 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
2962 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
2963 previously went unchallenged.
2964
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002965New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002966-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002967
2968Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002969-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002970
2971Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002972-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002973
2974Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002975----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002976
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00002977- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
2978 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00002979
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00002980- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
2981 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
2982 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
2983 home.
2984
2985
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002986What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002987===========================
2988
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002989*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
2990
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002991Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002992--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00002993
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002994- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
2995 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002996
2997 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00002998 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00002999
3000 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3001 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003002 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003003 This needs to be documented.
3004
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003005- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3006 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3007
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003008- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3009 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3010 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3011
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003012- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3013 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3014
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003015- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3016 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3017 class forbids it).
3018
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003019- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3020 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3021 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3022
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003023- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3024
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003025Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003026-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003027
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003028- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3029 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003030 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003031
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003032- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3033 (like 1 + '').
3034
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003035Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003036-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003037
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003038- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3039 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3040 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3041 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003042 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003043 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3044
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003045- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3046 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3047 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3048 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3049
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003050- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3051 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003052 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3053 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3054 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003055
3056- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3057 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003058
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003059- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3060 bytes on its input.
3061
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003062Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003063-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003064
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003065- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003066 convenience function.
3067
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003068- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3069 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3070 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003071 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3072 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3073 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3074 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3075 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3076 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003077
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003078- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3079 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3080 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3081 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3082
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003083- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3084 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3085 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3086
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003087- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3088 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3089 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3090 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3091
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003092- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3093 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003094 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003095 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3096 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3097 new -l and -e options.
3098
3099- statcache is now deprecated.
3100
3101- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3102 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003103 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003104 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3105 time properly taken into account.
3106
3107- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3108 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3109 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3110 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3111
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003112Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003113-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003114
3115Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003116-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003117
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003118- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3119 is built with libdb3 if available.
3120
3121- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3122
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003123C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003124-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003125
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003126- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3127 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3128 PySequence_Size().
3129
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003130- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3131
3132- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3133 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3134 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3135
3136- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3137 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3138
3139- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3140 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3141
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003142New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003143-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003144
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003145- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3146 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3147
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003148- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3149 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3150
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003151- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3152
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003153Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003154-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003155
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003156- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3157 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3158
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003159Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003160-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003161
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003162Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003163----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003164
3165- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3166 removed completely in the next release.
3167
3168- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3169 OSX.
3170
3171- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3172 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3173
3174- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3175
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003176
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003177What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003178===========================
3179
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003180*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3181
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003182Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003183--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003184
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003185- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003186 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003187 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003188 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3189 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003190 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3191 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003192 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3193 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003194
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003195- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3196 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3197
3198- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3199 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3200
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003201Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003202-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003203
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003204- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3205 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3206 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3207 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3208 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3209 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3210 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3211 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3212
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003213- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3214 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3215 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3216 example).
3217
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003218- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003219 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003220 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003221 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003222
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003223- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3224 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3225 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003226 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003227
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003228- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3229 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3230 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3231 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3232 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3233 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3234
3235 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3236
3237 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3238
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003239Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003240-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003241
3242- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3243
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003244- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3245
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003246- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3247 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003248
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003249- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3250 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3251 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3252 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3253 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3254 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003255 attributes.
3256
3257- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3258 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3259 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003260
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003261- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3262 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3263 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003264
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003265- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3266 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3267 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003268 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3269 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3270
3271- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3272 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003273
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003274Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003275-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003276
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003277- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3278 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3279
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003280- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3281 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3282 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3283 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3284
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003285- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3286 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3287 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3288 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3289
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003290 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3291 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3292 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3293 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3294 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3295 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3296 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3297 without losing information).
3298
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003299- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003300 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3301 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3302 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3303 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3304 module).
3305
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003306 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003307 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3308 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3309 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3310 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003311
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003312- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003313 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3314 encoding.
3315
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003316- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3317 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3318
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003319- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003320 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3321
3322- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3323 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3324 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3325 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3326
3327- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3328
3329- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3330 ON, and OFF.
3331
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003332- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3333 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3334
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003335Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003336-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003337
3338- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3339 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3340 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003341
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003342- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3343 been added: -X and -E.
3344
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003345Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003346-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003347
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003348- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3349 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3350
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003351C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003352-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003353
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003354- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3355 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3356 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3357 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3358 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3359
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003360- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3361 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3362 as long) arguments.
3363
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003364- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3365 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3366 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3367 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3368 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3369 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3370
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003371- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3372 input.
3373
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003374New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003375-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003376
3377Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003378-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003379
3380Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003381-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003382
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003383- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3384 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3385 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3386
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003387- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3388 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3389 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003390 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003391
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003392 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3393 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3394 import signal
3395 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003396
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003397 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003398 while 1:
3399 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003400 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003401 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3402 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3403 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3404 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003405
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003406
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003407What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3408===========================
3409
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003410*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3411
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003412Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003413--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003414
3415- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3416 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3417 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3418
3419- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3420 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3421 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3422 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3423 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3424 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3425 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003426
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003427- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003428 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003429 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3430 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3431 associate a docstring with a property.
3432
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003433- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3434 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3435 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3436 other built-in object types.
3437
3438- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3439 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3440 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3441 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3442 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3443
3444- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3445 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3446
3447- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3448 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003449 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003450 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3451 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3452 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3453 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3454 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3455
3456- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3457 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3458 class.
3459
3460- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3461 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3462 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3463 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3464
3465- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3466 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3467 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3468 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3469
3470- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3471 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3472
3473- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3474 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3475 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3476 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3477 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003478 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003479 with the same value as s.
3480
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003481- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3482
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003483Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003484----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003485
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003486- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3487
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003488- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3489 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3490 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3491 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3492 objects.
3493
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003494- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3495 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003496 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3497 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3498
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003499- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3500 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3501 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3502
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003503Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003504-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003505
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003506- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3507 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3508 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3509 by the instances.
3510
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003511- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3512 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3513 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3514
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003515- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3516 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3517 before the entire comparison is complete.
3518
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003519- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3520 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3521 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3522
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003523- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3524 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3525 getwriter().
3526
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003527- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3528 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3529
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003530- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003531 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3532 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3533
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003534- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3535 iterable object.
3536
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003537- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3538 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003539
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003540- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3541 authentication.
3542
3543- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3544 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003545
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003546- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003547 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3548 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3549 a sample driver.)
3550
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003551Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003553
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003554- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3555 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3556 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3557 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3558 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3559 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3560 kernel has large file support.
3561
3562- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3563 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3564 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3565 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3566 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3567
3568- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3569 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3570 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3571
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003572C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003573-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003574
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003575- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3576 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3577
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003578New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003579-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003580
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003581- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3582 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3583
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003584Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003585-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003586
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003587- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3588 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3589 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3590 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3591 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3592
3593- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3594 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3595 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3596 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3597
3598- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3599 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3600
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003601Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003602-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003603
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003604- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003605 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3606 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003607
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003608
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003609What's New in Python 2.2a3?
3610===========================
3611
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003612*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
3613
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003614Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003615----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003616
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003617- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
3618 big to represent as a C double.
3619
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00003620- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
3621 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
3622 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
3623 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
3624 restriction).
3625
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00003626- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
3627 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
3628 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
3629 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
3630 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
3631
3632 >>> dir([])
3633 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
3634 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
3635 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
3636 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
3637 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
3638 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
3639 'reverse', 'sort']
3640
3641 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
3642
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003643- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003644 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
3645 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
3646 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
3647 OverflowError exception.
3648
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00003649- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003650 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003651 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
3652 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
3653 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
3654 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
3655 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003656 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003657 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
3658 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
3659
3660 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
3661 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
3662 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
3663 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003664
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003665- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003666 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
3667 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
3668 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
3669 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
3670 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
3671 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
3672 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
3673 once it is created.
3674
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00003675- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
3676 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
3677 (key, value) pairs.
3678
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003679- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003680 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
3681 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
3682
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00003683- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
3684 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
3685 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
3686 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
3687 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003688
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003689- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003690 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
3691 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
3692
3693 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
3694
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003695- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00003696 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
3697
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003698Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003699-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003700
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003701- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00003702 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
3703 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00003704
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00003705- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
3706 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
3707 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
3708 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
3709 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
3710 in this area anymore).
3711
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00003712- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
3713 threading.Timer.
3714
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00003715- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
3716 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
3717
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003718- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003719 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
3720
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003721- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00003722 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
3723 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
3724 converted to Python longs.
3725
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003726- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003727 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
3728
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00003729- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
3730 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
3731 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
3732
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003733Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003734-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003735
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003736- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
3737 division operators as per PEP 238.
3738
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003739Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003740-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003741
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00003742- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
3743 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
3744 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
3745 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
3746
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003747C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003748-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00003749
3750- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003751
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003752- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
3753 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003754 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003755
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003756 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
3757 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003758 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003759 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00003760
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003761- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003762 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
3763 module:
3764
3765 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003766
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003767 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
3768 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003769
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003770 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
3771 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00003772
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00003773 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
3774
3775 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
3776
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003777- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00003778 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
3779 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
3780 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00003781
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003782New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003783-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003784
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00003785- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
3786 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
3787 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
3788 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
3789 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003790
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003791Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003792-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003793
3794Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003795-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003796
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003797- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
3798 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
3799 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
3800 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00003801 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
3802 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
3803 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
3804 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
3805 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00003806
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00003807- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00003808 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
3809
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003810
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003811What's New in Python 2.2a2?
3812===========================
3813
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003814*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
3815
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003816Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003817-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003818
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00003819- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
3820 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
3821
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003822- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
3823 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
3824 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003825
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00003826- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
3827 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
3828 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
3829 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003830
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003831- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
3832
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003833- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003834
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003835Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003836-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003837
3838- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00003839 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003840 the module docstring for details.
3841
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003842Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003843-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003844
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003845- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003846 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
3847 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
3848 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003849
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003850- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
3851 Nick Mathewson.
3852
3853Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003854----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003855
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003856- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
3857 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
3858 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
3859 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
3860 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
3861 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
3862 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
3863 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
3864
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00003865- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
3866 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
3867 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
3868 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
3869
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00003870- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
3871 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
3872 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
3873 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
3874 come a long way).
3875
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003876- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
3877 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
3878 write filters for these warnings).
3879
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00003880- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
3881 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
3882 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
3883 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
3884 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
3885
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00003886- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
3887 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
3888 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
3889 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
3890 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
3891 older distribution.
3892
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003893Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003894-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003895
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003896- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
3897 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00003898 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00003899
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003900- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
3901 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
3902 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
3903
3904- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
3905
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003906- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
3907
3908- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
3909
3910- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
3911
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003912- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00003913
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003914- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
3915
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003916New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003917-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003918
3919C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003920-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00003921
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00003922- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
3923 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
3924 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
3925 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
3926 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
3927 against buffer overruns.
3928
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003929- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003930 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
3931 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00003932 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
3933 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
3934 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
3935
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00003936- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
3937 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
3938 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
3939 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
3940 deprecated.
3941
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003942Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003943-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00003944
3945- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
3946 relevant is found.
3947
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00003948
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003949What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003950===========================
3951
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003952*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
3953
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00003954Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003955----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00003956
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003957- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
3958 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
3959 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
3960 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
3961 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
3962 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
3963 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
3964 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003965 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00003966 repaired.
3967
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003968- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00003969 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00003970 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
3971 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
3972 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
3973 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
3974 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
3975 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
3976 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
3977 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
3978
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00003979- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
3980 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
3981 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
3982 leading BMO character).
3983
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003984- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
3985 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
3986 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
3987
3988 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
3989 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
3990 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00003991
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00003992 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
3993 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
3994 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
3995 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
3996 for various simple to use conversions.
3997
3998 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
3999 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4000
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004001 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4002 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4003 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4004 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4005 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4006 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4007 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4008 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4009 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4010 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4011 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4012 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4013 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4014 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4015 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004016
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004017- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4018 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4019 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004020 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004021 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004022
4023 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004024 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4025 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4026 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4027 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4028 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004029 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4030 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004031
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004032 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4033 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4034 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004035 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004036
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004037- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4038 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4039 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4040 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4041 floating arithmetic,
4042
4043 x = 9007199254740992.0
4044 print long(x)
4045
4046 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4047 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4048 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4049 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4050 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4051 functions are of good quality).
4052
4053 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4054 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4055 algorithms to break.
4056
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004057- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4058 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4059 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4060 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4061 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4062 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4063 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4064 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4065 order.
4066
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004067- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4068 operation along the most common code paths.
4069
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004070- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4071 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4072
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004073- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4074 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4075 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4076 {}.update(UserDict())
4077
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004078- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4079 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4080 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4081 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4082 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4083 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4084 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4085 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4086
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004087- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004088 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004089
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004090 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004091 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4092 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004093 join() method of strings
4094 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004095 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4096 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004097 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004098 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004099
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004100- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4101 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4102
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004103- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4104 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4105
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004106- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4107 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4108 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4109 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4110
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004111- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4112 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004113 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004114 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4115 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004116
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004117- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4118
4119
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004120Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004121-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004122
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004123- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004124 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004125 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4126 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4127
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004128- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4129 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4130
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004131- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4132 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4133 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4134 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4135
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004136- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4137 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4138 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4139
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004140- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4141
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004142- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4143
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004144- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4145 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4146 that are still imported into string.py).
4147
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004148- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4149
4150- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4151 Now it does.
4152
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004153- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4154
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004155- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4156 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4157 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4158 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4159 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004160 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4161 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004162
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004163- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4164 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4165 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4166 'help(object)'.
4167
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004168Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004169-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004170
4171- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004172 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004173 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4174 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4175
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004176- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004177 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4178 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004179
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004180C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004181-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004182
4183- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4184 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004185
4186----
4187
4188**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**