blob: d63d5227c2b4c145bd52fa7125e1ab22c119cc5c [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00007What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +000010*Release date: XX-XXX-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000011
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +000015- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
16
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +000017- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
18 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
19 arguments.
20
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +000021- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
22 See SF bug #667147.
23
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000024Extension modules
25-----------------
26
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +000027- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
28
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +000029- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
30 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
31 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
32
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +000033- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
34
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +000035- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
36 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
37
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000038- datetime changes:
39
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +000040 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
41 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
42 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
43 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
44 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
45 now.
46
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000047 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000048 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
49 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +000050
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +000051 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000052 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000053 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
54 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
55 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
56 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000057
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000058 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
59 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
60 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +000061 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
62
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +000063 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
64 by a later example coded by Guido.
65
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +000066 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000067 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
68 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
69 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +000070 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
71 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
72
73 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
74 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
75 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
76 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
77 tzinfo subclass instance.
78
79 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
80 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
81 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
82 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
83 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
84 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
85 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
86 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +000087
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +000088 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
89 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
90 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
91 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
92 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
93 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to
94 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
95 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
96 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
97 as a naive datetime object.
98
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +000099 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
100 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
101 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
102
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +0000103 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
104 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
105 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
106 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
107 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
108 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
109 comparison.
110
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +0000111 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
112 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
113 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
114 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
115 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
116
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000117Library
118-------
119
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +0000120- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
121
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +0000122- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
123 exception.
124
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +0000125- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
126 class.
127
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +0000128- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
129 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
130 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
131
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +0000132- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
133 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
134
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +0000135- realpath is now exported when doing from poxixpath import *.
136 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
137 See SF bug #659228.
138
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +0000139- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
140 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
141 See SF patch #651082.
142
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +0000143- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000144
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +0000145- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
146 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
147
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000148Tools/Demos
149-----------
150
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000151TBD
152
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000153Build
154-----
155
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +0000156- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
157 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
158 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
159 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
160 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
161 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
162 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
163 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
164 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
165
166- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
167 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
168 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
169 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
170
171- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
172 from the Tools/scripts directory.
173
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000174C API
175-----
176
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +0000177- The PyArg_Parse functions now raise a TypeError instead of truncating float
178 arguments if an integer is specified (this affects the 'b', 'B', 'h', 'H',
179 'i', and 'l' codes).
180
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000181
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000182New platforms
183-------------
184
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000185TBD
186
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000187Tests
188-----
189
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000190TBD
191
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000192Windows
193-------
194
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +0000195- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
196 release without strong cryptography.
197
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +0000198- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
199 absolute pathname.
200
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000201- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
202 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
203
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000204Mac
205---
206
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000207TBD
208
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +0000209
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000210What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000211=================================
212
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +0000213*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000214
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000215Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000216--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000217
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +0000218- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
219
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000220- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
221 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000222 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +0000223 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +0000224 a different meaning than before.
225
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000226- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000227 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +0000228 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000229
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000230- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000231 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000232 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +0000233
234- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
235 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
236 and deallocation.
237
238- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
239 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
240
241- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
242 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
243 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
244 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
245 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
246
247- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
248 now detected by the garbage collector.
249
250- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
251 [SF bug 519621]
252
253- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
254 identifier.
255
256- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
257 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
258 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
259 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
260 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
261 [SF bug 563060]
262
263- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
264 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
265 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
266 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
267 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
268
269- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
270 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
271 not called. [SF bug #537450]
272
273- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
274
275- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
276 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
277 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
278 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
279 state of the slots would be lost.)
280
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000281Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000282-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000283
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000284- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000285 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
286 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
287 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
288 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000289 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
290 Jython 2.1.
291
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000292- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was inititally developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +0000293 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +0000294 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
295 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
296 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
297 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
298 these, see PEP 302.
299
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000300- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
301 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
302 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
303
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +0000304- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
305 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
306 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
307
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +0000308- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
309 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
310 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
311
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000312- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
313 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
314 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
315 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
316 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
317 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
318 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
319 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
320 releases or implementations.
321
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000322- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000323 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
324 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +0000325
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +0000326- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
327 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
328
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000329- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
330 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
331 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
332
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +0000333- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
334 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
335
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000336- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
337 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000338 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
339 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +0000340
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +0000341- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
342 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
343 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
344 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
345 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
346
347 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
348 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
349 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
350 pattern.
351
352 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
353 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
354 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
355 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
356
357 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
358 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
359 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
360 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
361 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
362 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
363
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +0000364- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
365 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
366 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
367 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
368 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
369 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
370 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
371 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +0000372
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +0000373- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
374 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
375 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
376 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
377 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000378 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
379 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
380 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
381 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
382 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
383 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
384 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000385
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000386- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
387 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
388
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000389- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
390 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
391 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
392 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
393 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
394 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
395 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
396 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
397 to Zack Weinberg!
398
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000399- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
400 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
401 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
402 type. This has been fixed now.
403
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000404- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
405 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
406 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
407
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000408- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
409 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
410 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
411 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
412 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
413 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
414 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
415 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000416 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000417
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000418- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
419 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
420 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000421
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000422- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
423 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
424 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
425 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
426 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
427 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
428 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
429 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +0000430 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000431 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
432 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
433
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000434- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
435 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
436 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
437 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
438 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
439 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
440 this.)
441
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000442- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
443 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000444 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000445 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000446 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
447 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000448 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
449 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000450
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +0000451- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
452 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
453 currently running.
454
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000455- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
456 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
457 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
458 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
459
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000460- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
461 as directory names.
462
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000463- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
464 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
465
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000466- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
467 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
468
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000469- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000470 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
471 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000472
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000473- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
474 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
475 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
476 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
477 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
478
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000479- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
480 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
481 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
482 removed.
483
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000484- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
485 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
486 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
487
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000488- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
489 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
490 to __debug__.
491
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000492- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
493 string to the left with zeros. For example,
494 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
495
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000496- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
497 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
498 deprecated now.
499
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000500- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
501 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
502 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000503
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +0000504- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
505 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
506 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
507 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
508 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +0000509
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000510- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
511 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
512
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000513- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
514 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
515 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000516 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000517 is backward compatible.
518
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000519- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
520 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
521 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
522 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
523 could access a pointer to freed memory.
524
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000525- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
526 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
527 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
528 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
529 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
530 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000531
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000532- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
533 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
534
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000535- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
536 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
537
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000538- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
539 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
540 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
541 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
542 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
543
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000544- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
545 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
546 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
547
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000548- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000549 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
550
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +0000551- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
552 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
553 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +0000554
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +0000555- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
556 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
557
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +0000558- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
559 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
560 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
561
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +0000562- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
563
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000564Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000565-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000566
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +0000567- Added three operators to the operator module:
568 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
569 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
570 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
571
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +0000572- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
573
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +0000574- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
575 archives.
576
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +0000577- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
578 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
579 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
580
581 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
582
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000583- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
584 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
585 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +0000586 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +0000587
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +0000588- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
589 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
590 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
591 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
592 3.0 to 4.1.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +0000593
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +0000594- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
595 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +0000596
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +0000597- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
598
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +0000599- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
600 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
601
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +0000602- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
603 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
604 supported.
605
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +0000606- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
607
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +0000608- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
609 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +0000610
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +0000611- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
612 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
613
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000614- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
615
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000616- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
617 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
618
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000619- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
620 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
621 functions but callable type objects.
622
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000623- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000624 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000625 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000626
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +0000627- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
628 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000629
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +0000630- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
631 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000632
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000633- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
634 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
635 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
636 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
637
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000638- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
639 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000640
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000641- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
642 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
643 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
644 and __imul__.
645
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000646- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000647 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
648 is called.
649
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000650- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
651 been added where available.
652
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000653- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
654 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
655 interpreter was compiled.
656
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000657- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
658 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
659 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000660 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +0000661 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
662 1, not 2.
663
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +0000664- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
665 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
666 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
667 limit.
668
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +0000669- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
670 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
671 bug #623464.
672
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +0000673- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
674 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
675 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
676 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
677
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000678Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000679-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000680
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +0000681- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
682
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +0000683- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
684 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
685 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
686 with Python 2.3a2.
687
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +0000688- os.path exposes getctime.
689
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +0000690- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
691 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparision
692 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
693 the result to zero. Approximate comparision is essential for
694 unit tests of floating point results.
695
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +0000696- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
697 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
698 has been increased.
699
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +0000700- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
701 executed.
702
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +0000703- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
704 postinstallation script.
705
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +0000706- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
707 test the current module.
708
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +0000709- When cancelling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
710 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
711 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
712 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
713 this behavior needs to be controlled.
714
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000715- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000716 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +0000717 Ward's Optik package.
718
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000719- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
720 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
721 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
722 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
723
724- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
725 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +0000726 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +0000727
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +0000728- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
729 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
730 shelf are binary pickles.
731
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +0000732- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
733 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
734
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +0000735- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
736 modules are iterators now.
737
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +0000738- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
739 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
740 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
741 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
742 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
743 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000744
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +0000745- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
746 with their entity value.
747
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +0000748- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
749
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000750- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
751 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +0000752
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +0000753- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
754 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +0000755 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +0000756
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +0000757- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
758 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
759 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
760 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
761 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
762 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
763 main():
764
765 import locale
766 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
767
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +0000768- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
769 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
770
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +0000771- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
772 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
773 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
774 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
775 to the new standard.
776
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +0000777- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
778 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
779 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
780 an extension to the database.
781
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000782- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
783 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
784 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
785 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +0000786 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000787
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000788- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +0000789 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +0000790
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000791- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
792 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
793 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
794 bounded integers.
795
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +0000796- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
797 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
798 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
799 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
800 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
801 in existence.
802
803 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
804 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
805 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
806 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
807 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
808 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
809
810 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
811 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
812 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
813 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
814
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000815- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
816 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
817 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
818
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000819- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
820
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000821- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
822 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
823 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
824 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
825
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000826- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
827 argument.
828
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000829- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
830 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
831 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
832 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
833 [SF patch 560794].
834
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000835- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
836 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
837 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000838 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
839 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
840 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000841
842- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
843 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000844
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000845- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
846 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
847 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
848 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000849
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000850- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
851 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
852 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
853 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
854 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
855
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000856- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000857
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +0000858- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
859
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000860- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
861 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
862 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
863 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
864 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
865 identical to None.
866
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000867- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
868 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
869 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
870 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
871 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
872 results now.
873
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000874- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
875 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
876
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000877- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
878 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
879 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
880 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
881 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
882 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
883 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
884 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
885
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000886- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
887
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000888- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
889 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
890
891- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
892 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
893 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
894 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
895 and other systems.
896
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000897- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
898 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
899 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
900 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 +0000901 work well with these.
902
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000903- compileall now supports quiet operation.
904
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000905- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000906 connections.
907
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000908- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
909 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
910 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
911
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000912- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
913 sets
914
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000915- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
916 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
917 name.
918
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000919- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
920 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
921 passed in.
922
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000923- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000924 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +0000925 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
926 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000927
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000928- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
929
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000930- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
931
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000932- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
933 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
934 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
935
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000936- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
937 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
938 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
939 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +0000940 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000941
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000942- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000943 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000944 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +0000945
946- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
947 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
948 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
949
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +0000950- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +0000951 the value of its expression argument.
952
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +0000953- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
954 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
955 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
956
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +0000957- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
958 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
959 skipstone browser was included.
960
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +0000961- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
962 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
963
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000964Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000965-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000966
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +0000967- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
968 names in addition to accepting file names.
969
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +0000970- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
971 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
972 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
973 still used and useful.)
974
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000975- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
976 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
977 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
978 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +0000979
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000980- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
981 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
982 the generated binary.
983
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000984Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +0000985-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000986
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +0000987- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
988
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000989- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
990 except in the hands of experts.
991
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000992- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +0000993 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
994 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
995 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +0000996
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +0000997- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
998 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
999 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
1000 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
1001 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
1002 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
1003 builds.
1004
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00001005- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
1006 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
1007 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
1008 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
1009 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
1010 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
1011 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
1012 new type.
1013
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00001014- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00001015
1016 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
1017 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
1018 positive infinities.
1019
1020 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
1021 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
1022 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
1023 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
1024 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
1025 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
1026 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
1027
1028 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
1029
1030 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
1031
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00001032- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
1033 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
1034 size of the executable.
1035
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00001036- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
1037 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
1038 configure script. On other platforms, remove
1039 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00001040
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00001041- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
1042
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00001043- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
1044 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
1045 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00001046
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00001047- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
1048 well as Unix.
1049
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00001050- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
1051 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
1052 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
1053 modules in the README file for details.
1054
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001055C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001056-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001057
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001058- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
1059 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001060 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00001061 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00001062 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00001063
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00001064- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
1065 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
1066 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
1067 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
1068 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
1069 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
1070 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
1071 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
1072 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
1073 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
1074 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
1075 aligned.)
1076
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00001077- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
1078 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
1079 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
1080
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00001081- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
1082 level.
1083
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00001084- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
1085 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
1086 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
1087 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
1088 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
1089
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00001090- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
1091 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
1092 code.
1093
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00001094- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
1095 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
1096 adjusting for negative indices.
1097
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00001098- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
1099 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
1100 object.
1101
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00001102- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
1103 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
1104 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
1105
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001106- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
1107 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00001108
1109- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
1110
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00001111- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
1112 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
1113 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
1114 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
1115
1116- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
1117
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00001118- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00001119
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001120- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00001121 without going through the buffer API.
1122
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001123- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00001124
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00001125- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
1126 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
1127 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
1128 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
1129
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001130- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
1131 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
1132
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001133- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00001134 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
1135
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001136New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001137-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001138
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00001139- OpenVMS is now supported.
1140
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00001141- AtheOS is now supported.
1142
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00001143- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
1144
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00001145- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
1146
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001147Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001148-----
1149
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00001150- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
1151 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
1152 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001153
1154Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001155-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001156
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001157- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
1158 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
1159 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
1160 bugs.
1161 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00001162 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous verion of
1163 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
1164 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001165 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00001166
1167- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00001168 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00001169
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00001170- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
1171 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
1172
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00001173- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
1174 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
1175 MSVC 6, sys.version constains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
1176 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
1177
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00001178- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
1179 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
1180 use files" uninstall option).
1181
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00001182- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
1183
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001184- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
1185 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
1186
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00001187- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
1188 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
1189 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
1190
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001191- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
1192 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
1193 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
1194 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
1195 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00001196 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
1197 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
1198 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00001199
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001200- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001201 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00001202 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
1203 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
1204 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
1205 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
1206 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
1207 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
1208 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
1209 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
1210 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
1211 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
1212 work around.
1213
1214- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
1215 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
1216 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
1217 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
1218 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
1219 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
1220 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
1221 specified with O_CREAT too).
1222
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001223Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001224----
1225
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001226- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001227
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001228- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
1229 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
1230 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
1231
1232- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
1233 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
1234 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
1235 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
1236 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
1237 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
1238 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
1239 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00001240
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00001241- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
1242 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
1243 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001244
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001245- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
1246 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
1247 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
1248 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
1249 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001250
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001251- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
1252 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
1253 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001254
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001255- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
1256 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001257
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001258- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
1259 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
1260 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
1261 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
1262 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001263
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001264- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
1265 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
1266 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
1267
1268- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
1269 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
1270 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001271
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001272- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
1273 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
1274 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
1275 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
1276 Help Viewer comaptible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001277
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001278- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
1279 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001280
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00001281- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
1282 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001283
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00001284- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
1285 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was but "ascii", like on
1286 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
1287 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001288
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001289What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001290===============================
1291
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001292*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
1293
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001294Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001295--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001296
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001297- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
1298 with a custom metaclass.
1299
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001300Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001301-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001302
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001303- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
1304 are proxies.
1305
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001306Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001307-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001308
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001309- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
1310 very short strings.
1311
1312- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
1313 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
1314 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
1315 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
1316 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
1317
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001318Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001319-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001320
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001321- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
1322 close or delete time).
1323
1324- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
1325 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
1326
1327- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
1328
1329- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001330 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001331
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001332Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001333-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001334
1335Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001336-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001337
1338C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001339-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001340
1341New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001342-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001343
1344Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001345-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001346
1347Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001348-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001349
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001350- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
1351
1352- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
1353 instances are deleted at process exit time.
1354
1355- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
1356 deleted at process exit time.
1357
1358- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
1359 in backslash.
1360
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001361Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001362----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001363
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00001364- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
1365 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
1366 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
1367
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00001368
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00001369What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001370===========================
1371
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001372*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
1373
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001374Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001375--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001376
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001377- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
1378 been extensively updated. See
1379
1380 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
1381
1382 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
1383
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00001384- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
1385 deleted!
1386
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00001387- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
1388 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
1389 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
1390 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
1391 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
1392
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001393- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
1394
1395 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
1396 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
1397
1398 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
1399 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
1400 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
1401 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
1402 supported anyway.
1403
1404 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
1405 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
1406
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00001407- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
1408 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
1409 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
1410 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
1411 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00001412
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00001413- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
1414 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
1415 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
1416
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001417Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001418-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001419
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001420- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
1421 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
1422 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
1423 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
1424 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
1425 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00001426 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
1427 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
1428 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
1429 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001430
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00001431- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
1432 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
1433 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
1434
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001435Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001436-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001437
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001438- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
1439
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001440Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001441-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001442
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00001443- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
1444 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
1445 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
1446 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
1447 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
1448 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
1449
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00001450- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
1451
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00001452- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
1453
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00001454- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
1455
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001456- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
1457 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
1458 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
1459
1460- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
1461
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001462Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001463-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001464
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001465- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
1466 off a search on Google.
1467
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001468Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001469-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001470
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001471- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
1472 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
1473 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
1474 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
1475 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
1476 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
1477 other platforms should do likewise.
1478
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00001479- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
1480 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
1481 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
1482
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001483C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001484-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001485
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001486- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
1487 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
1488 producing key-value pairs.
1489
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001490- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00001491 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00001492 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
1493 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
1494 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
1495 previously went unchallenged.
1496
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001497New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001498-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001499
1500Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001501-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001502
1503Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001504-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001505
1506Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001507----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001508
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00001509- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
1510 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00001511
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00001512- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
1513 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
1514 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
1515 home.
1516
1517
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001518What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001519===========================
1520
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001521*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
1522
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001523Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001524--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001525
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001526- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
1527 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001528
1529 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00001530 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001531
1532 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
1533 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001534 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00001535 This needs to be documented.
1536
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00001537- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
1538 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
1539
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00001540- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
1541 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
1542 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
1543
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00001544- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
1545 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
1546
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001547- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
1548 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
1549 class forbids it).
1550
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00001551- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
1552 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
1553 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
1554
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001555- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
1556
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001557Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001558-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001559
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001560- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
1561 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001562 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00001563
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001564- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
1565 (like 1 + '').
1566
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001567Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001568-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001569
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001570- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
1571 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
1572 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
1573 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001574 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001575 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
1576
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00001577- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
1578 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
1579 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
1580 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
1581
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001582- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
1583 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001584 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
1585 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
1586 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00001587
1588- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
1589 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001590
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00001591- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
1592 bytes on its input.
1593
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001594Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001595-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001596
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00001597- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00001598 convenience function.
1599
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001600- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
1601 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
1602 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001603 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
1604 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
1605 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
1606 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
1607 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
1608 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00001609
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00001610- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
1611 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
1612 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
1613 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
1614
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00001615- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
1616 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
1617 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
1618
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001619- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
1620 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
1621 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
1622 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
1623
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001624- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
1625 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001626 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001627 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
1628 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
1629 new -l and -e options.
1630
1631- statcache is now deprecated.
1632
1633- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
1634 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001635 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001636 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
1637 time properly taken into account.
1638
1639- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
1640 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
1641 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
1642 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
1643
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001644Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001645-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001646
1647Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001648-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001649
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001650- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
1651 is built with libdb3 if available.
1652
1653- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
1654
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001655C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001656-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001657
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00001658- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
1659 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
1660 PySequence_Size().
1661
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001662- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1663
1664- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1665 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1666 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1667
1668- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1669 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1670
1671- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1672 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1673
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001674New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001675-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001676
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001677- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1678 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1679
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001680- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1681 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1682
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001683- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1684
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001685Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001686-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001687
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001688- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1689 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1690
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001691Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001692-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001693
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001694Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001695----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001696
1697- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1698 removed completely in the next release.
1699
1700- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1701 OSX.
1702
1703- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1704 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1705
1706- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1707
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001708
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001709What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001710===========================
1711
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001712*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
1713
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001714Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001715--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001716
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001717- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001718 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001719 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001720 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1721 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001722 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1723 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001724 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1725 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001726
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001727- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1728 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1729
1730- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1731 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1732
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001733Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001734-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001735
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001736- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1737 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1738 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1739 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1740 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1741 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1742 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1743 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1744
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001745- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1746 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1747 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1748 example).
1749
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001750- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001751 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001752 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001753 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001754
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001755- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1756 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1757 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001758 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001759
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001760- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1761 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1762 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1763 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1764 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1765 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1766
1767 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1768
1769 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1770
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001771Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001772-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001773
1774- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1775
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001776- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1777
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001778- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1779 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001780
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001781- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1782 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1783 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1784 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1785 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1786 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001787 attributes.
1788
1789- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1790 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1791 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001792
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001793- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1794 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1795 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001796
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001797- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1798 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1799 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001800 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1801 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1802
1803- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1804 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001805
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001806Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001807-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001808
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001809- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1810 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1811
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001812- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1813 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1814 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1815 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1816
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001817- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1818 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1819 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1820 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1821
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001822 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1823 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1824 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1825 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1826 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1827 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1828 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1829 without losing information).
1830
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001831- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001832 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1833 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1834 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1835 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1836 module).
1837
1838 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1839 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1840 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1841 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1842 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001843
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001844- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001845 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1846 encoding.
1847
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001848- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1849 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1850
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001851- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001852 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1853
1854- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1855 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1856 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1857 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1858
1859- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1860
1861- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1862 ON, and OFF.
1863
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001864- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1865 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1866
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001867Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001868-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001869
1870- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1871 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1872 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001873
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001874- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1875 been added: -X and -E.
1876
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001877Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001878-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001879
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001880- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1881 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1882
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001883C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001884-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001885
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001886- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1887 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1888 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1889 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1890 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1891
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001892- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1893 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1894 as long) arguments.
1895
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001896- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1897 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1898 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1899 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1900 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1901 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1902
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001903- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1904 input.
1905
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001906New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001907-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001908
1909Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001910-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001911
1912Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001913-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001914
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001915- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1916 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1917 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1918
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001919- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1920 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1921 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00001922 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001923
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001924 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1925 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1926 import signal
1927 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001928
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001929 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001930 while 1:
1931 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001932 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00001933 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1934 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1935 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1936 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001937
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001938
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001939What's New in Python 2.2a4?
1940===========================
1941
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001942*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
1943
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001944Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001945--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001946
1947- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1948 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1949 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1950
1951- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1952 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1953 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1954 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1955 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1956 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1957 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001958
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001959- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001960 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001961 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1962 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1963 associate a docstring with a property.
1964
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001965- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1966 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1967 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1968 other built-in object types.
1969
1970- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1971 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1972 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1973 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1974 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1975
1976- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1977 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1978
1979- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1980 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001981 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001982 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1983 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1984 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1985 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1986 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1987
1988- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1989 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1990 class.
1991
1992- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1993 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1994 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1995 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1996
1997- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1998 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1999 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
2000 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
2001
2002- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
2003 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
2004
2005- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
2006 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
2007 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
2008 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
2009 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002010 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002011 with the same value as s.
2012
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00002013- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
2014
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002015Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002016----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00002017
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00002018- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
2019
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00002020- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
2021 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
2022 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
2023 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
2024 objects.
2025
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00002026- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
2027 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00002028 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
2029 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
2030
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002031- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
2032 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
2033 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
2034
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002035Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002036-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002037
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00002038- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2039 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
2040 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
2041 by the instances.
2042
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00002043- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
2044 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
2045 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
2046
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002047- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
2048 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
2049 before the entire comparison is complete.
2050
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00002051- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
2052 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
2053 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
2054
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00002055- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
2056 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
2057 getwriter().
2058
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002059- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
2060 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
2061
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00002062- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002063 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
2064 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
2065
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00002066- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
2067 iterable object.
2068
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002069- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
2070 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002071
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002072- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
2073 authentication.
2074
2075- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
2076 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00002077
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002078- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00002079 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
2080 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
2081 a sample driver.)
2082
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002083Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002084-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002085
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002086- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
2087 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
2088 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
2089 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
2090 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
2091 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
2092 kernel has large file support.
2093
2094- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
2095 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
2096 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
2097 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
2098 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
2099
2100- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
2101 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
2102 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
2103
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002104C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002105-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002106
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002107- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
2108 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
2109
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002110New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002111-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002112
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002113- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
2114 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
2115
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002116Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002117-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002118
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002119- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
2120 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
2121 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
2122 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
2123 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
2124
2125- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
2126 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
2127 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
2128 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
2129
2130- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
2131 especially in regard to reporting errors.
2132
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002133Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002134-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002135
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002136- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00002137 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
2138 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00002139
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00002140
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002141What's New in Python 2.2a3?
2142===========================
2143
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002144*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
2145
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002146Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002147----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002148
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002149- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
2150 big to represent as a C double.
2151
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00002152- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
2153 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
2154 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
2155 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
2156 restriction).
2157
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00002158- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
2159 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
2160 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
2161 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
2162 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
2163
2164 >>> dir([])
2165 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
2166 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
2167 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
2168 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
2169 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
2170 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
2171 'reverse', 'sort']
2172
2173 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
2174
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002175- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002176 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
2177 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
2178 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
2179 OverflowError exception.
2180
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00002181- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002182 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002183 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
2184 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
2185 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
2186 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
2187 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00002188 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002189 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
2190 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
2191
2192 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
2193 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
2194 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
2195 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002196
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002197- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002198 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
2199 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
2200 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
2201 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
2202 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
2203 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
2204 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
2205 once it is created.
2206
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00002207- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
2208 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
2209 (key, value) pairs.
2210
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002211- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002212 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
2213 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
2214
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00002215- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
2216 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
2217 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
2218 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
2219 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002220
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002221- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002222 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
2223 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
2224
2225 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
2226
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002227- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00002228 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
2229
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002230Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002231-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002232
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002233- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00002234 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
2235 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00002236
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00002237- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
2238 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
2239 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
2240 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
2241 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
2242 in this area anymore).
2243
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00002244- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
2245 threading.Timer.
2246
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00002247- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
2248 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
2249
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002250- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002251 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
2252
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002253- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00002254 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
2255 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
2256 converted to Python longs.
2257
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002258- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002259 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
2260
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00002261- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
2262 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
2263 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
2264
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002265Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002266-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002267
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002268- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
2269 division operators as per PEP 238.
2270
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002271Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002272-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002273
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00002274- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
2275 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
2276 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
2277 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
2278
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002279C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002280-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00002281
2282- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002283
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002284- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
2285 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002286 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002287
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002288 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
2289 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002290 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002291 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00002292
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002293- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002294 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
2295 module:
2296
2297 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002298
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002299 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
2300 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002301
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002302 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
2303 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00002304
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00002305 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
2306
2307 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
2308
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002309- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00002310 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
2311 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
2312 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00002313
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002314New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002315-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002316
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00002317- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
2318 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
2319 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
2320 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
2321 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002322
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002323Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002324-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002325
2326Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002327-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002328
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002329- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
2330 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
2331 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
2332 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00002333 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
2334 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
2335 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
2336 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
2337 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00002338
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00002339- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00002340 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
2341
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00002342
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002343What's New in Python 2.2a2?
2344===========================
2345
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002346*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
2347
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002348Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002349-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002350
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00002351- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
2352 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
2353
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002354- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
2355 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
2356 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002357
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00002358- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
2359 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
2360 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
2361 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002362
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002363- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
2364
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002365- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002366
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002367Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002368-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002369
2370- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00002371 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002372 the module docstring for details.
2373
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002374Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002375-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002376
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002377- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002378 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
2379 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
2380 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002381
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002382- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
2383 Nick Mathewson.
2384
2385Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002386----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002387
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002388- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
2389 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
2390 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
2391 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
2392 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
2393 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
2394 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
2395 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
2396
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00002397- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
2398 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
2399 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
2400 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
2401
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00002402- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
2403 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
2404 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
2405 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
2406 come a long way).
2407
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002408- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
2409 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
2410 write filters for these warnings).
2411
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00002412- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
2413 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
2414 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
2415 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
2416 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
2417
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00002418- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
2419 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
2420 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
2421 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
2422 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
2423 older distribution.
2424
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002425Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002426-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002427
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002428- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
2429 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00002430 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00002431
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002432- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
2433 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
2434 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
2435
2436- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
2437
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002438- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
2439
2440- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
2441
2442- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
2443
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002444- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00002445
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00002446- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
2447
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002448New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002449-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002450
2451C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002452-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00002453
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00002454- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
2455 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
2456 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
2457 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
2458 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
2459 against buffer overruns.
2460
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002461- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002462 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
2463 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00002464 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
2465 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
2466 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
2467
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00002468- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
2469 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
2470 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
2471 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
2472 deprecated.
2473
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002474Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002475-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00002476
2477- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
2478 relevant is found.
2479
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00002480
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002481What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002482===========================
2483
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002484*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
2485
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002486Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002487----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002488
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002489- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
2490 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
2491 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
2492 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
2493 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
2494 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
2495 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
2496 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002497 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00002498 repaired.
2499
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002500- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00002501 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002502 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
2503 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
2504 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
2505 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
2506 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
2507 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
2508 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
2509 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
2510
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00002511- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
2512 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
2513 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
2514 leading BMO character).
2515
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002516- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
2517 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
2518 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
2519
2520 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
2521 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
2522 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002523
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002524 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
2525 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
2526 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
2527 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
2528 for various simple to use conversions.
2529
2530 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
2531 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
2532
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002533 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2534 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
2535 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
2536 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
2537 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2538 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
2539 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2540 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
2541 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2542 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
2543 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2544 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
2545 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
2546 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
2547 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00002548
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002549- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
2550 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
2551 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002552 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002553 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002554
2555 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002556 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
2557 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
2558 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
2559 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
2560 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002561 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
2562 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00002563
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002564 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
2565 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
2566 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00002567 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002568
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00002569- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
2570 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
2571 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
2572 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
2573 floating arithmetic,
2574
2575 x = 9007199254740992.0
2576 print long(x)
2577
2578 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
2579 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
2580 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
2581 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
2582 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
2583 functions are of good quality).
2584
2585 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
2586 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
2587 algorithms to break.
2588
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00002589- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
2590 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
2591 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
2592 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
2593 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
2594 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
2595 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
2596 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
2597 order.
2598
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002599- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
2600 operation along the most common code paths.
2601
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002602- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
2603 the same as dict.has_key(x).
2604
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00002605- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
2606 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
2607 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
2608 {}.update(UserDict())
2609
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00002610- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
2611 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
2612 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
2613 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
2614 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
2615 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
2616 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
2617 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
2618
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00002619- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002620 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002621
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002622 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00002623 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
2624 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00002625 join() method of strings
2626 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002627 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
2628 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002629 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00002630 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00002631
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00002632- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
2633 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
2634
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00002635- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
2636 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
2637
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00002638- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
2639 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
2640 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
2641 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
2642
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002643- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
2644 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002645 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00002646 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
2647 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00002648
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00002649- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
2650
2651
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002652Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002653-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002654
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002655- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002656 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00002657 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
2658 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
2659
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00002660- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
2661 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
2662
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00002663- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
2664 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
2665 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
2666 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
2667
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00002668- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
2669 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
2670 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
2671
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00002672- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
2673
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00002674- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
2675
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00002676- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
2677 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
2678 that are still imported into string.py).
2679
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002680- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
2681
2682- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
2683 Now it does.
2684
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002685- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
2686
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002687- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
2688 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
2689 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
2690 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
2691 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00002692 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
2693 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00002694
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00002695- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
2696 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
2697 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
2698 'help(object)'.
2699
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002700Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002701-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002702
2703- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002704 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002705 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
2706 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
2707
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002708- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00002709 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
2710 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00002711
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002712C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002713-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002714
2715- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2716 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002717
2718----
2719
2720**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**