blob: 37ed63aa9a4f528841d25f080b3e909930811b1d [file] [log] [blame]
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00001What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
2XXX Release date: DD-MMM-2002 XXX
3=================================
4
5Type/class unification and new-style classes
6
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00007- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old and the new
8 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00009 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +000010
11- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
12 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
13 and deallocation.
14
15- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
16 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
17
18- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
19 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
20 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
21 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
22 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
23
24- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
25 now detected by the garbage collector.
26
27- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
28 [SF bug 519621]
29
30- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
31 identifier.
32
33- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
34 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
35 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
36 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
37 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
38 [SF bug 563060]
39
40- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
41 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
42 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
43 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
44 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
45
46- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
47 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
48 not called. [SF bug #537450]
49
50- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
51
52- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
53 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
54 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
55 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
56 state of the slots would be lost.)
57
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +000058Core and builtins
59
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +000060- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
61 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
62
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +000063- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
64 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
65 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
66
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +000067- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
68 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
69
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +000070- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
71 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
72 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but not kept up
73 to date).
74
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +000075- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
76 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
77 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
78 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
79 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
80
81 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
82 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
83 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
84 pattern.
85
86 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
87 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
88 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
89 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
90
91 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
92 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
93 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
94 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
95 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
96 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
97
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +000098- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
99 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
100 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
101 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
102 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000103 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
104 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
105 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
106 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
107 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
108 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
109 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000110
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000111- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
112 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
113
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +0000114- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
115 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
116 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
117 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
118 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
119 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
120 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
121 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
122 to Zack Weinberg!
123
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +0000124- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
125 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
126 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
127 type. This has been fixed now.
128
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +0000129- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
130 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
131 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
132
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000133- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
134 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
135 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
136 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
137 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
138 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
139 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
140 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +0000141 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000142
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +0000143- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
144 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
145 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +0000146
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000147- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
148 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
149 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
150 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
151 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
152 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
153 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
154 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
155 len(list)*2 bytes (*4 on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
156 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
157 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
158
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +0000159- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
160 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
161 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
162 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
163 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
164 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
165 this.)
166
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000167- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
168 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000169 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000170 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +0000171 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
172 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +0000173 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
174 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +0000175
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +0000176- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
177 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
178 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
179 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
180
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +0000181- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
182 as directory names.
183
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +0000184- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
185 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
186
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +0000187- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
188 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
189
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000190- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +0000191 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
192 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +0000193
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +0000194- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
195 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
196 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
197 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
198 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
199
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000200- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
201 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
202 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
203 removed.
204
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +0000205- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
206 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
207 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
208
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +0000209- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
210 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
211 to __debug__.
212
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +0000213- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
214 string to the left with zeros. For example,
215 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
216
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +0000217- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
218 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
219 deprecated now.
220
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +0000221- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
222 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
223 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +0000224
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +0000225- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
226 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
227
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000228- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
229 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
230 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000231 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +0000232 is backward compatible.
233
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +0000234- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
235 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
236 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
237 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
238 could access a pointer to freed memory.
239
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +0000240- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
241 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
242 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
243 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
244 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
245 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000246
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +0000247- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
248 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
249
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000250- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
251 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
252
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000253- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
254 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
255 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
256 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
257 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
258
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +0000259- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
260 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
261 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
262
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000263- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +0000264 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
265
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000266Extension modules
267
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +0000268- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
269
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000270- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
271 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
272
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +0000273- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
274 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
275 functions but callable type objects.
276
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000277- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000278 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000279 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +0000280
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000281- posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and posix.getpgid have been
282 added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +0000283
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +0000284- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface.
285
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +0000286- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
287 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
288 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
289 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
290
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +0000291- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
292 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +0000293
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +0000294- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
295 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
296 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
297 and __imul__.
298
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +0000299- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +0000300 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
301 is called.
302
Michael W. Hudson34f20ea2002-05-27 15:08:24 +0000303- signal.sigpending, signal.sigprocmask and signal.sigsuspend have
304 been added where available.
305
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +0000306- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
307 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
308 interpreter was compiled.
309
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000310Library
311
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +0000312- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
313 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
314 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
315 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
316 is the base class of the two. (This is not documented yet, but
317 help(sets) gives a wealth of information.)
318
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +0000319- Added operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to a**b.
320
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +0000321- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
322 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
323 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
324 bounded integers.
325
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +0000326- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
327 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
328 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
329
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +0000330- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
331
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000332- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
333 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
334 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
335 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
336
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +0000337- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
338 argument.
339
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +0000340- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
341 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
342 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
343 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
344 [SF patch 560794].
345
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000346- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
347 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
348 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +0000349 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
350 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
351 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +0000352
353- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
354 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +0000355
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +0000356- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
357 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
358 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
359 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +0000360
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +0000361- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
362 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
363 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
364 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
365 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
366
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000367- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +0000368
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +0000369- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
370 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
371 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
372 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
373 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
374 identical to None.
375
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +0000376- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
377 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
378 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
379 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
380 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
381 results now.
382
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +0000383- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
384 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
385
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +0000386- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
387 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
388 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
389 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
390 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
391 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
392 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
393 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
394
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +0000395- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
396
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +0000397- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
398 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
399
400- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
401 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
402 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
403 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
404 and other systems.
405
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +0000406- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
407 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
408 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
409 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 +0000410 work well with these.
411
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +0000412- compileall now supports quiet operation.
413
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000414- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +0000415 connections.
416
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +0000417- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
418 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
419 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
420
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +0000421- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
422 sets
423
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +0000424- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
425 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
426 name.
427
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +0000428- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
429 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
430 passed in.
431
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000432- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +0000433 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
434 on a per-message basis.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +0000435
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +0000436- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
437
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +0000438- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
439
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +0000440- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
441 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
442 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
443
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +0000444- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
445 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
446 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
447 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
448 honored.
449
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000450Tools/Demos
451
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +0000452- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
453 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
454 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
455 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +0000456
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +0000457- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
458 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
459 the generated binary.
460
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000461Build
462
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +0000463- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +0000464 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
465 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
466 are deprecated.
467
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +0000468- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
469 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
470 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
471 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
472 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
473 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
474 builds.
475
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +0000476- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
477 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
478 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
479 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
480 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
481 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
482 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
483 new type.
484
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +0000485- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +0000486
487 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
488 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
489 positive infinities.
490
491 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
492 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
493 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
494 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
495 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
496 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
497 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
498
499 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
500
501 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
502
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +0000503- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
504 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
505 size of the executable.
506
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +0000507- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
508 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
509 configure script. On other platforms, remove
510 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +0000511
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +0000512- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
513
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +0000514- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
515 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
516 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +0000517
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +0000518- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
519 well as Unix.
520
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +0000521- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
522 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
523 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
524 modules in the README file for details.
525
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000526C API
527
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +0000528- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
529 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
530 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
531 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
532 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
533 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
534 strings are now usually mortal; theres a new API,
535 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
536 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
537 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
538 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
539 aligned.)
540
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +0000541- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
542 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
543 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
544
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +0000545- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
546 level.
547
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +0000548- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
549 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
550 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
551 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
552 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
553
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +0000554- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
555 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
556 code.
557
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +0000558- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
559 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
560 adjusting for negative indices.
561
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +0000562- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
563 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
564 object.
565
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +0000566- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
567 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
568 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
569
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +0000570- The type of tp_free has been changed from "void (*)(PyObject *)" to
571 "void (*)(void *)".
572
573- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
574
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +0000575- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
576 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
577 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
578 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
579
580- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
581
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +0000582- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +0000583
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000584- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +0000585 without going through the buffer API.
586
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +0000587- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix PyCmp_.
588
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +0000589- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
590 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
591 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
592 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
593
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000594- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
595 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
596
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000597- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +0000598 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
599
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000600New platforms
601
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +0000602- AtheOS is now supported.
603
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +0000604- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
605
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +0000606- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
607
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000608Tests
609
610Windows
611
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +0000612- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
613 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
614 use files" uninstall option).
615
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +0000616- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
617
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +0000618- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
619 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
620
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +0000621- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
622 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
623 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
624
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +0000625- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
626 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
627 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
628 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
629 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +0000630 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
631 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
632 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +0000633
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000634- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000635 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +0000636 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
637 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
638 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
639 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
640 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
641 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
642 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
643 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
644 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
645 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
646 work around.
647
648- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
649 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
650 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
651 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
652 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
653 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
654 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
655 specified with O_CREAT too).
656
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +0000657Mac
658
659
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000660What's New in Python 2.2 final?
661Release date: 21-Dec-2001
662===============================
663
664Type/class unification and new-style classes
665
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000666- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
667 with a custom metaclass.
668
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000669Core and builtins
670
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000671- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
672 are proxies.
673
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000674Extension modules
675
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000676- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
677 very short strings.
678
679- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
680 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
681 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
682 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
683 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
684
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000685Library
686
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000687- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
688 close or delete time).
689
690- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
691 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
692
693- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
694
695- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000696 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000697
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000698Tools/Demos
699
700Build
701
702C API
703
704New platforms
705
706Tests
707
708Windows
709
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000710- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
711
712- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
713 instances are deleted at process exit time.
714
715- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
716 deleted at process exit time.
717
718- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
719 in backslash.
720
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000721Mac
722
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +0000723- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
724 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
725 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
726
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +0000727
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +0000728What's New in Python 2.2c1?
729Release date: 14-Dec-2001
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000730===========================
731
732Type/class unification and new-style classes
733
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000734- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
735 been extensively updated. See
736
737 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
738
739 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
740
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +0000741- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
742 deleted!
743
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +0000744- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
745 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
746 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
747 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
748 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
749
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +0000750- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
751
752 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
753 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
754
755 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
756 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
757 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
758 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
759 supported anyway.
760
761 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
762 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
763
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +0000764- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
765 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
766 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
767 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
768 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +0000769
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +0000770- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
771 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
772 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
773
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000774Core and builtins
775
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +0000776- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
777 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
778 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
779 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
780 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
781 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +0000782 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
783 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
784 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
785 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +0000786
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +0000787- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
788 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
789 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
790
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000791Extension modules
792
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +0000793- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
794
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000795Library
796
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +0000797- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
798 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
799 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
800 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
801 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
802 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
803
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +0000804- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
805
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +0000806- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
807
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +0000808- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
809
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000810- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
811 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
812 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
813
814- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
815
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000816Tools/Demos
817
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000818- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
819 off a search on Google.
820
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000821Build
822
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000823- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
824 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
825 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
826 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
827 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
828 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
829 other platforms should do likewise.
830
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +0000831- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
832 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
833 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
834
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000835C API
836
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +0000837- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
838 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
839 producing key-value pairs.
840
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +0000841- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +0000842 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +0000843 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
844 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
845 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
846 previously went unchallenged.
847
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000848New platforms
849
850Tests
851
852Windows
853
854Mac
855
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +0000856- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
857 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +0000858
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +0000859- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
860 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
861 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
862 home.
863
864
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000865What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +0000866Release date: 16-Nov-2001
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000867===========================
868
869Type/class unification and new-style classes
870
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +0000871- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
872 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +0000873
874 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +0000875 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +0000876
877 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
878 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000879 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +0000880 This needs to be documented.
881
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +0000882- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
883 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
884
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +0000885- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
886 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
887 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
888
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +0000889- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
890 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
891
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +0000892- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
893 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
894 class forbids it).
895
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +0000896- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
897 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
898 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
899
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +0000900- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
901
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000902Core and builtins
903
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +0000904- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
905 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +0000906 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +0000907
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +0000908- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
909 (like 1 + '').
910
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000911Extension modules
912
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +0000913- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
914 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
915 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
916 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +0000917 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +0000918 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
919
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +0000920- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
921 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
922 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
923 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
924
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +0000925- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
926 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +0000927 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
928 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
929 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +0000930
931- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
932 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +0000933
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +0000934- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
935 bytes on its input.
936
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000937Library
938
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +0000939- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +0000940 convenience function.
941
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +0000942- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
943 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
944 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +0000945 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
946 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
947 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
948 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
949 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
950 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +0000951
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +0000952- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
953 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
954 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
955 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
956
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +0000957- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
958 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
959 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
960
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +0000961- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
962 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
963 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
964 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
965
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +0000966- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
967 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
968 optional `strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
969 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
970 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
971 new -l and -e options.
972
973- statcache is now deprecated.
974
975- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
976 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
977 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional `localtime' flag is
978 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
979 time properly taken into account.
980
981- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
982 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
983 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
984 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
985
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000986Tools/Demos
987
988Build
989
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +0000990- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
991 is built with libdb3 if available.
992
993- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
994
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +0000995C API
996
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +0000997- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
998 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
999 PySequence_Size().
1000
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001001- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
1002
1003- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
1004 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
1005 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
1006
1007- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
1008 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
1009
1010- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
1011 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
1012
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001013New platforms
1014
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00001015- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
1016 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
1017
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00001018- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
1019 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
1020
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00001021- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
1022
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001023Tests
1024
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00001025- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
1026 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
1027
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001028Windows
1029
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00001030Mac
1031
1032- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
1033 removed completely in the next release.
1034
1035- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
1036 OSX.
1037
1038- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
1039 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
1040
1041- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
1042
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00001043
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001044What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001045Release date: 19-Oct-2001
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001046===========================
1047
1048Type/class unification and new-style classes
1049
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001050- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001051 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001052 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001053 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
1054 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00001055 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
1056 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00001057 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
1058 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00001059
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00001060- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
1061 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
1062
1063- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
1064 class methods, static methods, and properties.
1065
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001066Core and builtins
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001067
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00001068- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
1069 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
1070 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
1071 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
1072 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
1073 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
1074 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
1075 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
1076
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001077- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
1078 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
1079 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
1080 example).
1081
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001082- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001083 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001084 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001085 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00001086
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001087- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
1088 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
1089 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00001090 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001091
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001092- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
1093 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
1094 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
1095 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
1096 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
1097 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
1098
1099 isinstance(x, (A, B))
1100
1101 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
1102
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001103Extension modules
1104
1105- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
1106
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001107- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
1108
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001109- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
1110 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00001111
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00001112- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
1113 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
1114 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
1115 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
1116 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
1117 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00001118 attributes.
1119
1120- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
1121 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
1122 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00001123
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001124- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
1125 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
1126 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001127
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001128- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
1129 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
1130 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001131 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
1132 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
1133
1134- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
1135 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00001136
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00001137Library
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001138
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00001139- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
1140 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
1141
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001142- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
1143 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
1144 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
1145 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
1146
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00001147- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
1148 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
1149 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
1150 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
1151
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00001152 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
1153 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
1154 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
1155 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
1156 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
1157 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
1158 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
1159 without losing information).
1160
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001161- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00001162 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
1163 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
1164 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
1165 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
1166 module).
1167
1168 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overriden by subclasses.
1169 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
1170 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
1171 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
1172 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00001173
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00001174- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00001175 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
1176 encoding.
1177
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00001178- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
1179 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
1180
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001181- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a `file' argument
1182 to allow saving the message body to a file.
1183
1184- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
1185 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
1186 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
1187 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
1188
1189- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
1190
1191- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
1192 ON, and OFF.
1193
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00001194- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
1195 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
1196
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00001197Tools/Demos
1198
1199- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
1200 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
1201 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001202
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001203- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
1204 been added: -X and -E.
1205
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001206Build
1207
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00001208- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
1209 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
1210
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001211C API
1212
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00001213- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
1214 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
1215 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
1216 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
1217 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
1218
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00001219- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
1220 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
1221 as long) arguments.
1222
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00001223- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
1224 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
1225 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
1226 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
1227 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
1228 report any bugs or strange behavior).
1229
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00001230- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
1231 input.
1232
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001233New platforms
1234
1235Tests
1236
1237Windows
1238
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00001239- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
1240 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
1241 is created for .py and .pyw files.
1242
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00001243- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
1244 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
1245 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
1246 signal.signal(). For example:
1247
1248 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
1249 # (SIGINT) behavior.
1250 import signal
1251 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK,
1252 signal.default_int_handler)
1253
1254 try:
1255 while 1:
1256 pass
1257 except KeyboardInterrupt:
1258 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
1259 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
1260 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
1261 print "Clean exit"
1262
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00001263
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001264What's New in Python 2.2a4?
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001265Release date: 28-Sep-2001
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001266===========================
1267
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001268Type/class unification and new-style classes
1269
1270- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
1271 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
1272 documentation for all operations on list objects.
1273
1274- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
1275 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
1276 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
1277 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
1278 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
1279 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
1280 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001281
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001282- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001283 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00001284 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
1285 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
1286 associate a docstring with a property.
1287
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001288- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
1289 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
1290 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
1291 other built-in object types.
1292
1293- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
1294 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
1295 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
1296 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
1297 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
1298
1299- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
1300 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
1301
1302- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
1303 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001304 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001305 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
1306 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
1307 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
1308 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
1309 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
1310
1311- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
1312 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
1313 class.
1314
1315- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
1316 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
1317 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
1318 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
1319
1320- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
1321 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
1322 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
1323 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
1324
1325- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
1326 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
1327
1328- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
1329 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
1330 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
1331 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
1332 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00001333 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001334 with the same value as s.
1335
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001336- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
1337
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00001338Core
1339
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00001340- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
1341
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00001342- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
1343 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
1344 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
1345 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
1346 objects.
1347
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00001348- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
1349 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00001350 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
1351 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
1352
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001353- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
1354 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
1355 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
1356
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001357Library
1358
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00001359- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1360 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
1361 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
1362 by the instances.
1363
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00001364- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
1365 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
1366 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
1367
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001368- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
1369 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
1370 before the entire comparison is complete.
1371
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00001372- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
1373 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
1374 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
1375
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00001376- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
1377 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
1378 getwriter().
1379
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001380- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
1381 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
1382
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00001383- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001384 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
1385 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
1386
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00001387- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
1388 iterable object.
1389
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001390- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
1391 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001392
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001393- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
1394 authentication.
1395
1396- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
1397 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00001398
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001399- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001400 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
1401 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
1402 a sample driver.)
1403
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00001404Tools
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001405
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001406Build
1407
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001408- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
1409 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
1410 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
1411 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
1412 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
1413 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
1414 kernel has large file support.
1415
1416- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
1417 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
1418 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
1419 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
1420 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
1421
1422- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
1423 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
1424 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
1425
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001426C API
1427
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001428- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
1429 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
1430
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001431New platforms
1432
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001433- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
1434 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
1435
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001436Tests
1437
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001438- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
1439 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
1440 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
1441 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
1442 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
1443
1444- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
1445 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
1446 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
1447 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
1448
1449- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
1450 especially in regard to reporting errors.
1451
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001452Windows
1453
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001454- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00001455 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
1456 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00001457
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00001458
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001459What's New in Python 2.2a3?
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001460Release Date: 07-Sep-2001
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001461===========================
1462
1463Core
1464
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001465- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
1466 big to represent as a C double.
1467
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00001468- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
1469 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
1470 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
1471 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
1472 restriction).
1473
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00001474- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
1475 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
1476 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
1477 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
1478 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
1479
1480 >>> dir([])
1481 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
1482 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
1483 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
1484 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
1485 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
1486 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
1487 'reverse', 'sort']
1488
1489 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
1490
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001491- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001492 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
1493 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
1494 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
1495 OverflowError exception.
1496
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00001497- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001498 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001499 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
1500 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
1501 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
1502 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
1503 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00001504 (for use with fixdiv.py).
1505 [Note: the remainder of this paragraph (preserved below) became
1506 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2]
1507 <obsolete>
1508 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
1509 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
1510 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
1511 warns about classic division everywhere else.
1512 </obsolete>
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001513
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001514- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001515 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
1516 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
1517 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
1518 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
1519 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
1520 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
1521 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
1522 once it is created.
1523
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00001524- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
1525 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
1526 (key, value) pairs.
1527
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001528- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001529 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
1530 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
1531
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00001532- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
1533 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
1534 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
1535 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
1536 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001537
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001538- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001539 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
1540 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
1541
1542 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
1543
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001544- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00001545 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
1546
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001547Library
1548
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00001549- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
1550 setting an option negotiation callback.
1551
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00001552- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
1553 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
1554 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
1555 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
1556 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
1557 in this area anymore).
1558
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00001559- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
1560 threading.Timer.
1561
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00001562- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
1563 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
1564
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001565- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001566 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
1567
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001568- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00001569 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
1570 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
1571 converted to Python longs.
1572
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001573- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001574 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
1575
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00001576- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
1577 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
1578 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
1579
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001580Tools
1581
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001582- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
1583 division operators as per PEP 238.
1584
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001585Build
1586
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00001587- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
1588 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
1589 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
1590 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
1591
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00001592C API
1593
1594- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001595
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00001596- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
1597 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
1598 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check:
1599
1600 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
1601 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
1602 /* The conversion failed. */
1603 }
1604
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001605- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001606 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
1607 module:
1608
1609 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001610
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001611 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
1612 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001613
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001614 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
1615 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00001616
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00001617 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
1618
1619 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
1620
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001621- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00001622 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
1623 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
1624 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00001625
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001626New platforms
1627
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00001628- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
1629 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
1630 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
1631 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
1632 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001633
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001634Tests
1635
1636Windows
1637
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00001638- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
1639 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
1640 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
1641 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00001642 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
1643 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
1644 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
1645 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
1646 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00001647
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00001648- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00001649 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
1650
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00001651
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001652What's New in Python 2.2a2?
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00001653Release Date: 22-Aug-2001
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001654===========================
1655
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001656Build
1657
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00001658- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
1659 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
1660
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001661- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
1662 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
1663 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001664
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00001665- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
1666 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
1667 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
1668 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001669
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001670- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
1671
1672- The `new' module is now statically linked.
1673
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001674Tools
1675
1676- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00001677 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001678 the module docstring for details.
1679
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001680Tests
1681
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001682- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001683 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
1684 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
1685 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001686
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001687- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
1688 Nick Mathewson.
1689
1690Core
1691
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001692- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
1693 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
1694 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
1695 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
1696 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
1697 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
1698 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
1699 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
1700
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00001701- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
1702 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
1703 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
1704 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
1705
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00001706- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
1707 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
1708 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
1709 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
1710 come a long way).
1711
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00001712- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
1713 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
1714 write filters for these warnings).
1715
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00001716- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
1717 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
1718 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
1719 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
1720 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
1721
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00001722- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
1723 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
1724 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
1725 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
1726 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
1727 older distribution.
1728
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00001729Library
1730
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001731- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
1732 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00001733 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00001734
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00001735- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
1736 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
1737 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
1738
1739- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
1740
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00001741- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
1742
1743- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
1744
1745- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
1746
1747- The `new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
1748
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00001749- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
1750
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00001751New platforms
1752
1753C API
1754
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00001755- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
1756 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
1757 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
1758 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
1759 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
1760 against buffer overruns.
1761
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00001762- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00001763 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
1764 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00001765 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
1766 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
1767 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
1768
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00001769- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
1770 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
1771 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
1772 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
1773 deprecated.
1774
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00001775Windows
1776
1777- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
1778 relevant is found.
1779
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00001780
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00001781What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Barry Warsawd970fe42001-10-25 21:53:30 +00001782Release date: 18-Jul-2001
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00001783===========================
1784
1785Core
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001786
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00001787- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
1788 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
1789 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
1790 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
1791 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
1792 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
1793 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
1794 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001795 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00001796 repaired.
1797
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00001798- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00001799 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00001800 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
1801 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
1802 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
1803 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
1804 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
1805 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
1806 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
1807 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
1808
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00001809- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
1810 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
1811 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
1812 leading BMO character).
1813
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00001814- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
1815 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
1816 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
1817
1818 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
1819 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
1820 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00001821
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00001822 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
1823 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
1824 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
1825 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
1826 for various simple to use conversions.
1827
1828 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
1829 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
1830
1831 Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description
1832 ----------------------------------------------------------------------
1833 uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email)
1834 base64 | string | string | base64 codec
Guido van Rossumc3415802001-06-06 13:30:54 +00001835 quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00001836 zlib | string | string | zlib compression
1837 hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec
1838 rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec
1839
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00001840- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
1841 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
1842 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00001843 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00001844 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00001845
1846 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00001847 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
1848 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
1849 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
1850 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
1851 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001852 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
1853 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00001854
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001855 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
1856 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
1857 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00001858 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00001859
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00001860- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
1861 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
1862 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
1863 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
1864 floating arithmetic,
1865
1866 x = 9007199254740992.0
1867 print long(x)
1868
1869 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
1870 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
1871 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
1872 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
1873 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
1874 functions are of good quality).
1875
1876 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
1877 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
1878 algorithms to break.
1879
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00001880- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
1881 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
1882 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
1883 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
1884 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
1885 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
1886 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
1887 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
1888 order.
1889
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00001890- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
1891 operation along the most common code paths.
1892
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00001893- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
1894 the same as dict.has_key(x).
1895
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00001896- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
1897 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
1898 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
1899 {}.update(UserDict())
1900
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00001901- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
1902 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
1903 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
1904 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
1905 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
1906 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
1907 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
1908 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
1909
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00001910- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
1911 arguments:
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00001912 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00001913 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
1914 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00001915 join() method of strings
1916 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00001917 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
1918 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00001919 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as
1920 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00001921
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00001922- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
1923 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
1924
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00001925- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
1926 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
1927
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00001928- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
1929 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
1930 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
1931 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
1932
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00001933- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
1934 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00001935 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00001936 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
1937 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00001938
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00001939- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
1940
1941
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001942Library
1943
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00001944- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001945 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00001946 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
1947 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
1948
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00001949- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
1950 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
1951
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00001952- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
1953 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
1954 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
1955 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
1956
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00001957- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
1958 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
1959 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
1960
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00001961- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
1962
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00001963- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
1964
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00001965- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
1966 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
1967 that are still imported into string.py).
1968
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001969- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
1970
1971- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
1972 Now it does.
1973
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00001974- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
1975
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00001976- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
1977 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
1978 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
1979 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
1980 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00001981 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
1982 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00001983
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00001984- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
1985 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
1986 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
1987 'help(object)'.
1988
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001989Tests
1990
1991- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001992 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001993 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
1994 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
1995
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00001996- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00001997 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
1998 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00001999
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00002000C API
2001
2002- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
2003 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
2004
2005
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00002006======================================================================
2007
2008
Guido van Rossumffe13be2001-04-16 18:46:45 +00002009What's New in Python 2.1 (final)?
2010=================================
2011
2012We only changed a few things since the last release candidate, all in
2013Python library code:
2014
2015- A bug in the locale module was fixed that affected locales which
2016 define no grouping for numeric formatting.
2017
2018- A few bugs in the weakref module's implementations of weak
2019 dictionaries (WeakValueDictionary and WeakKeyDictionary) were fixed,
2020 and the test suite was updated to check for these bugs.
2021
2022- An old bug in the os.path.walk() function (introduced in Python
2023 2.0!) was fixed: a non-existent file would cause an exception
2024 instead of being ignored.
2025
2026- Fixed a few bugs in the new symtable module found by Neil Norwitz's
2027 PyChecker.
2028
2029
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00002030What's New in Python 2.1c2?
2031===========================
Barry Warsaw11e89c72001-04-11 20:37:57 +00002032
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00002033A flurry of small changes, and one showstopper fixed in the nick of
2034time made it necessary to release another release candidate. The list
2035here is the *complete* list of patches (except version updates):
Guido van Rossum4fb60362001-04-13 00:46:14 +00002036
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00002037Core
Guido van Rossum4fb60362001-04-13 00:46:14 +00002038
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00002039- Tim discovered a nasty bug in the dictionary code, caused by
2040 PyDict_Next() calling dict_resize(), and the GC code's use of
2041 PyDict_Next() violating an assumption in dict_items(). This was
2042 fixed with considerable amounts of band-aid, but the net effect is a
2043 saner and more robust implementation.
2044
2045- Made a bunch of symbols static that were accidentally global.
2046
2047Build and Ports
2048
2049- The setup.py script didn't check for a new enough version of zlib
2050 (1.1.3 is needed). Now it does.
2051
2052- Changed "make clean" target to also remove shared libraries.
2053
2054- Added a more general warning about the SGI Irix optimizer to README.
2055
2056Library
2057
2058- Fix a bug in urllib.basejoin("http://host", "../file.html") which
2059 omitted the slash between host and file.html.
2060
2061- The mailbox module's _Mailbox class contained a completely broken
2062 and undocumented seek() method. Ripped it out.
2063
2064- Fixed a bunch of typos in various library modules (urllib2, smtpd,
2065 sgmllib, netrc, chunk) found by Neil Norwitz's PyChecker.
2066
2067- Fixed a few last-minute bugs in unittest.
2068
2069Extensions
2070
2071- Reverted the patch to the OpenSSL code in socketmodule.c to support
2072 RAND_status() and the EGD, and the subsequent patch that tried to
2073 fix it for pre-0.9.5 versions; the problem with the patch is that on
2074 some systems it issues a warning whenever socket is imported, and
2075 that's unacceptable.
2076
2077Tests
2078
2079- Fixed the pickle tests to work with "import test.test_pickle".
2080
2081- Tweaked test_locale.py to actually run the test Windows.
2082
2083- In distutils/archive_util.py, call zipfile.ZipFile() with mode "w",
2084 not "wb" (which is not a valid mode at all).
2085
2086- Fix pstats browser crashes. Import readline if it exists to make
2087 the user interface nicer.
2088
2089- Add "import thread" to the top of test modules that import the
2090 threading module (test_asynchat and test_threadedtempfile). This
2091 prevents test failures caused by a broken threading module resulting
2092 from a previously caught failed import.
2093
2094- Changed test_asynchat.py to set the SO_REUSEADDR option; this was
2095 needed on some platforms (e.g. Solaris 8) when the tests are run
2096 twice in succession.
2097
2098- Skip rather than fail test_sunaudiodev if no audio device is found.
2099
2100
2101What's New in Python 2.1c1?
2102===========================
2103
2104This list was significantly updated when 2.1c2 was released; the 2.1c1
2105release didn't mention most changes that were actually part of 2.1c1:
2106
2107Legal
2108
2109- Copyright was assigned to the Python Software Foundation (PSF) and a
2110 PSF license (very similar to the CNRI license) was added.
2111
2112- The CNRI copyright notice was updated to include 2001.
2113
2114Core
Barry Warsaw11e89c72001-04-11 20:37:57 +00002115
Guido van Rossumc9932722001-04-12 02:31:27 +00002116- After a public outcry, assignment to __debug__ is no longer illegal;
2117 instead, a warning is issued. It will become illegal in 2.2.
2118
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00002119- Fixed a core dump with "%#x" % 0, and changed the semantics so that
2120 "%#x" now always prepends "0x", even if the value is zero.
2121
2122- Fixed some nits in the bytecode compiler.
2123
2124- Fixed core dumps when calling certain kinds of non-functions.
2125
2126- Fixed various core dumps caused by reference count bugs.
2127
2128Build and Ports
2129
2130- Use INSTALL_SCRIPT to install script files.
2131
Guido van Rossum34d37dc2001-04-11 21:03:32 +00002132- New port: SCO Unixware 7, by Billy G. Allie.
2133
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00002134- Updated RISCOS port.
2135
2136- Updated BeOS port and notes.
2137
2138- Various other porting problems resolved.
2139
2140Library
2141
2142- The TERMIOS and SOCKET modules are now truly obsolete and
2143 unnecessary. Their symbols are incorporated in the termios and
2144 socket modules.
2145
2146- Fixed some 64-bit bugs in pickle, cPickle, and struct, and added
2147 better tests for pickling.
2148
2149- threading: make Condition.wait() robust against KeyboardInterrupt.
2150
2151- zipfile: add support to zipfile to support opening an archive
2152 represented by an open file rather than a file name. Fix bug where
2153 the archive was not properly closed. Fixed a bug in this bugfix
2154 where flush() was called for a read-only file.
2155
2156- imputil: added an uninstall() method to the ImportManager.
2157
2158- Canvas: fixed bugs in lower() and tkraise() methods.
2159
2160- SocketServer: API change (added overridable close_request() method)
2161 so that the TCP server can explicitly close the request.
2162
2163- pstats: Eric Raymond added a simple interactive statistics browser,
2164 invoked when the module is run as a script.
2165
2166- locale: fixed a problem in format().
2167
2168- webbrowser: made it work when the BROWSER environment variable has a
2169 value like "/usr/bin/netscape". Made it auto-detect Konqueror for
2170 KDE 2. Fixed some other nits.
2171
2172- unittest: changes to allow using a different exception than
2173 AssertionError, and added a few more function aliases. Some other
2174 small changes.
2175
2176- urllib, urllib2: fixed redirect problems and a coupleof other nits.
2177
2178- asynchat: fixed a critical bug in asynchat that slipped through the
2179 2.1b2 release. Fixed another rare bug.
2180
2181- Fix some unqualified except: clauses (always a bad code example).
2182
2183XML
2184
2185- pyexpat: new API get_version_string().
2186
2187- Fixed some minidom bugs.
2188
2189Extensions
2190
2191- Fixed a core dump in _weakref. Removed the weakref.mapping()
2192 function (it adds nothing to the API).
2193
2194- Rationalized the use of header files in the readline module, to make
2195 it compile (albeit with some warnings) with the very recent readline
2196 4.2, without breaking for earlier versions.
2197
2198- Hopefully fixed a buffering problem in linuxaudiodev.
2199
2200- Attempted a fix to make the OpenSSL support in the socket module
2201 work again with pre-0.9.5 versions of OpenSSL.
2202
2203Tests
2204
2205- Added a test case for asynchat and asyncore.
2206
2207- Removed coupling between tests where one test failing could break
2208 another.
2209
2210Tools
2211
2212- Ping added an interactive help browser to pydoc, fixed some nits
2213 in the rest of the pydoc code, and added some features to his
2214 inspect module.
2215
2216- An updated python-mode.el version 4.1 which integrates Ken
2217 Manheimer's pdbtrack.el. This makes debugging Python code via pdb
2218 much nicer in XEmacs and Emacs. When stepping through your program
2219 with pdb, in either the shell window or the *Python* window, the
2220 source file and line will be tracked by an arrow. Very cool!
2221
2222- IDLE: syntax warnings in interactive mode are changed into errors.
2223
2224- Some improvements to Tools/webchecker (ignore some more URL types,
Tim Peters0e57abf2001-05-02 07:39:38 +00002225 follow some more links).
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00002226
2227- Brought the Tools/compiler package up to date.
Guido van Rossum34d37dc2001-04-11 21:03:32 +00002228
Barry Warsaw11e89c72001-04-11 20:37:57 +00002229
Martin v. Löwis0411f6f2001-03-21 08:01:39 +00002230What's New in Python 2.1 beta 2?
2231================================
2232
Guido van Rossum053ae352001-03-22 14:17:21 +00002233(Unlisted are many fixed bugs, more documentation, etc.)
2234
Martin v. Löwis0411f6f2001-03-21 08:01:39 +00002235Core language, builtins, and interpreter
2236
Guido van Rossum053ae352001-03-22 14:17:21 +00002237- The nested scopes work (enabled by "from __future__ import
2238 nested_scopes") is completed; in particular, the future now extends
2239 into code executed through exec, eval() and execfile(), and into the
2240 interactive interpreter.
2241
2242- When calling a base class method (e.g. BaseClass.__init__(self)),
2243 this is now allowed even if self is not strictly spoken a class
2244 instance (e.g. when using metaclasses or the Don Beaudry hook).
2245
2246- Slice objects are now comparable but not hashable; this prevents
2247 dict[:] from being accepted but meaningless.
2248
2249- Complex division is now calculated using less braindead algorithms.
2250 This doesn't change semantics except it's more likely to give useful
2251 results in extreme cases. Complex repr() now uses full precision
2252 like float repr().
2253
2254- sgmllib.py now calls handle_decl() for simple <!...> declarations.
2255
Jeremy Hyltonf626db72001-03-23 14:18:27 +00002256- It is illegal to assign to the name __debug__, which is set when the
2257 interpreter starts. It is effectively a compile-time constant.
2258
2259- A warning will be issued if a global statement for a variable
2260 follows a use or assignment of that variable.
2261
Martin v. Löwis0411f6f2001-03-21 08:01:39 +00002262Standard library
2263
Guido van Rossum053ae352001-03-22 14:17:21 +00002264- unittest.py, a unit testing framework by Steve Purcell (PyUNIT,
2265 inspired by JUnit), is now part of the standard library. You now
2266 have a choice of two testing frameworks: unittest requires you to
2267 write testcases as separate code, doctest gathers them from
2268 docstrings. Both approaches have their advantages and
2269 disadvantages.
2270
2271- A new module Tix was added, which wraps the Tix extension library
2272 for Tk. With that module, it is not necessary to statically link
2273 Tix with _tkinter, since Tix will be loaded with Tcl's "package
2274 require" command. See Demo/tix/.
2275
2276- tzparse.py is now obsolete.
2277
2278- In gzip.py, the seek() and tell() methods are removed -- they were
2279 non-functional anyway, and it's better if callers can test for their
2280 existence with hasattr().
2281
2282Python/C API
2283
2284- PyDict_Next(): it is now safe to call PyDict_SetItem() with a key
2285 that's already in the dictionary during a PyDict_Next() iteration.
2286 This used to fail occasionally when a dictionary resize operation
2287 could be triggered that would rehash all the keys. All other
2288 modifications to the dictionary are still off-limits during a
2289 PyDict_Next() iteration!
2290
2291- New extended APIs related to passing compiler variables around.
2292
2293- New abstract APIs PyObject_IsInstance(), PyObject_IsSubclass()
2294 implement isinstance() and issubclass().
2295
2296- Py_BuildValue() now has a "D" conversion to create a Python complex
2297 number from a Py_complex C value.
Martin v. Löwis0411f6f2001-03-21 08:01:39 +00002298
Fred Drake4e262a92001-03-22 18:26:47 +00002299- Extensions types which support weak references must now set the
2300 field allocated for the weak reference machinery to NULL themselves;
2301 this is done to avoid the cost of checking each object for having a
2302 weakly referencable type in PyObject_INIT(), since most types are
2303 not weakly referencable.
2304
Jeremy Hyltonf626db72001-03-23 14:18:27 +00002305- PyFrame_FastToLocals() and PyFrame_LocalsToFast() copy bindings for
2306 free variables and cell variables to and from the frame's f_locals.
2307
2308- Variants of several functions defined in pythonrun.h have been added
2309 to support the nested_scopes future statement. The variants all end
2310 in Flags and take an extra argument, a PyCompilerFlags *; examples:
2311 PyRun_AnyFileExFlags(), PyRun_InteractiveLoopFlags(). These
2312 variants may be removed in Python 2.2, when nested scopes are
Tim Peters0e57abf2001-05-02 07:39:38 +00002313 mandatory.
Jeremy Hyltonf626db72001-03-23 14:18:27 +00002314
Andrew M. Kuchling8e9972c2001-03-22 15:42:08 +00002315Distutils
2316
2317- the sdist command now writes a PKG-INFO file, as described in PEP 241,
2318 into the release tree.
2319
Tim Peters0e57abf2001-05-02 07:39:38 +00002320- several enhancements to the bdist_wininst command from Thomas Heller
Andrew M. Kuchling8e9972c2001-03-22 15:42:08 +00002321 (an uninstaller, more customization of the installer's display)
2322
2323- from Jack Jansen: added Mac-specific code to generate a dialog for
2324 users to specify the command-line (because providing a command-line with
Tim Peters0e57abf2001-05-02 07:39:38 +00002325 MacPython is awkward). Jack also made various fixes for the Mac
Andrew M. Kuchling8e9972c2001-03-22 15:42:08 +00002326 and the Metrowerks compiler.
Tim Peters0e57abf2001-05-02 07:39:38 +00002327
2328- added 'platforms' and 'keywords' to the set of metadata that can be
2329 specified for a distribution.
Andrew M. Kuchling8e9972c2001-03-22 15:42:08 +00002330
2331- applied patches from Jason Tishler to make the compiler class work with
2332 Cygwin.
2333
2334
Tim Peters2fe289a2001-03-01 22:19:38 +00002335What's New in Python 2.1 beta 1?
2336================================
Tim Petersd66595f2001-02-04 03:09:53 +00002337
2338Core language, builtins, and interpreter
2339
Guido van Rossum9d0fbde2001-03-02 14:00:32 +00002340- Following an outcry from the community about the amount of code
2341 broken by the nested scopes feature introduced in 2.1a2, we decided
2342 to make this feature optional, and to wait until Python 2.2 (or at
2343 least 6 months) to make it standard. The option can be enabled on a
2344 per-module basis by adding "from __future__ import nested_scopes" at
2345 the beginning of a module (before any other statements, but after
2346 comments and an optional docstring). See PEP 236 (Back to the
2347 __future__) for a description of the __future__ statement. PEP 227
2348 (Statically Nested Scopes) has been updated to reflect this change,
2349 and to clarify the semantics in a number of endcases.
2350
2351- The nested scopes code, when enabled, has been hardened, and most
2352 bugs and memory leaks in it have been fixed.
2353
2354- Compile-time warnings are now generated for a number of conditions
2355 that will break or change in meaning when nested scopes are enabled:
2356
2357 - Using "from...import *" or "exec" without in-clause in a function
2358 scope that also defines a lambda or nested function with one or
2359 more free (non-local) variables. The presence of the import* or
2360 bare exec makes it impossible for the compiler to determine the
2361 exact set of local variables in the outer scope, which makes it
2362 impossible to determine the bindings for free variables in the
2363 inner scope. To avoid the warning about import *, change it into
2364 an import of explicitly name object, or move the import* statement
2365 to the global scope; to avoid the warning about bare exec, use
2366 exec...in... (a good idea anyway -- there's a possibility that
2367 bare exec will be deprecated in the future).
2368
2369 - Use of a global variable in a nested scope with the same name as a
2370 local variable in a surrounding scope. This will change in
2371 meaning with nested scopes: the name in the inner scope will
2372 reference the variable in the outer scope rather than the global
2373 of the same name. To avoid the warning, either rename the outer
2374 variable, or use a global statement in the inner function.
2375
Neil Schemenauera35c6882001-02-27 04:45:05 +00002376- An optional object allocator has been included. This allocator is
2377 optimized for Python objects and should be faster and use less memory
2378 than the standard system allocator. It is not enabled by default
2379 because of possible thread safety problems. The allocator is only
2380 protected by the Python interpreter lock and it is possible that some
2381 extension modules require a thread safe allocator. The object
2382 allocator can be enabled by providing the "--with-pymalloc" option to
2383 configure.
2384
Tim Petersd66595f2001-02-04 03:09:53 +00002385Standard library
2386
Martin v. Löwis2a5130e2001-02-27 04:21:58 +00002387- pyexpat now detects the expat version if expat.h defines it. A
2388 number of additional handlers are provided, which are only available
2389 since expat 1.95. In addition, the methods SetParamEntityParsing and
2390 GetInputContext of Parser objects are available with 1.95.x
2391 only. Parser objects now provide the ordered_attributes and
2392 specified_attributes attributes. A new module expat.model was added,
2393 which offers a number of additional constants if 1.95.x is used.
2394
2395- xml.dom offers the new functions registerDOMImplementation and
2396 getDOMImplementation.
2397
2398- xml.dom.minidom offers a toprettyxml method. A number of DOM
2399 conformance issues have been resolved. In particular, Element now
2400 has an hasAttributes method, and the handling of namespaces was
2401 improved.
2402
Andrew M. Kuchlingd6a1d792001-02-28 21:05:42 +00002403- Ka-Ping Yee contributed two new modules: inspect.py, a module for
2404 getting information about live Python code, and pydoc.py, a module
2405 for interactively converting docstrings to HTML or text.
2406 Tools/scripts/pydoc, which is now automatically installed into
Tim Peters1eff7962001-03-01 02:31:33 +00002407 <prefix>/bin, uses pydoc.py to display documentation; try running
Guido van Rossume3955a82001-03-02 14:05:59 +00002408 "pydoc -h" for instructions. "pydoc -g" pops up a small GUI that
2409 lets you browse the module docstrings using a web browser.
Andrew M. Kuchlingd6a1d792001-02-28 21:05:42 +00002410
Tim Peters1eff7962001-03-01 02:31:33 +00002411- New library module difflib.py, primarily packaging the SequenceMatcher
2412 class at the heart of the popular ndiff.py file-comparison tool.
2413
2414- doctest.py (a framework for verifying Python code examples in docstrings)
2415 is now part of the std library.
2416
Tim Petersd66595f2001-02-04 03:09:53 +00002417Windows changes
2418
Guido van Rossume3955a82001-03-02 14:05:59 +00002419- A new entry in the Start menu, "Module Docs", runs "pydoc -g" -- a
2420 small GUI that lets you browse the module docstrings using your
2421 default web browser.
2422
Tim Peters1eff7962001-03-01 02:31:33 +00002423- Import is now case-sensitive. PEP 235 (Import on Case-Insensitive
2424 Platforms) is implemented. See
2425
2426 http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/pep-0235.html
2427
2428 for full details, especially the "Current Lower-Left Semantics" section.
2429 The new Windows import rules are simpler than before:
2430
2431 A. If the PYTHONCASEOK environment variable exists, same as
2432 before: silently accept the first case-insensitive match of any
2433 kind; raise ImportError if none found.
2434
2435 B. Else search sys.path for the first case-sensitive match; raise
2436 ImportError if none found.
2437
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002438 The same rules have been implemented on other platforms with case-
Tim Peters1eff7962001-03-01 02:31:33 +00002439 insensitive but case-preserving filesystems too (including Cygwin, and
2440 several flavors of Macintosh operating systems).
Tim Petersd66595f2001-02-04 03:09:53 +00002441
Tim Peters25a9ce32001-02-19 07:06:36 +00002442- winsound module: Under Win9x, winsound.Beep() now attempts to simulate
2443 what it's supposed to do (and does do under NT and 2000) via direct
2444 port manipulation. It's unknown whether this will work on all systems,
Tim Peters1eff7962001-03-01 02:31:33 +00002445 but it does work on my Win98SE systems now and was known to be useless on
Tim Peters25a9ce32001-02-19 07:06:36 +00002446 all Win9x systems before.
2447
Tim Peters1eff7962001-03-01 02:31:33 +00002448- Build: Subproject _test (effectively) renamed to _testcapi.
2449
Tim Peters2fe289a2001-03-01 22:19:38 +00002450New platforms
2451
2452- 2.1 should compile and run out of the box under MacOS X, even using HFS+.
2453 Thanks to Steven Majewski!
2454
2455- 2.1 should compile and run out of the box on Cygwin. Thanks to Jason
2456 Tishler!
2457
Guido van Rossum9089b272001-03-02 06:49:50 +00002458- 2.1 contains new files and patches for RISCOS, thanks to Dietmar
2459 Schwertberger! See RISCOS/README for more information -- it seems
2460 that because of the bizarre filename conventions on RISCOS, no port
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00002461 to that platform is easy.
Guido van Rossum9089b272001-03-02 06:49:50 +00002462
Tim Peters25a9ce32001-02-19 07:06:36 +00002463
Tim Petersd7b5e882001-01-25 03:36:26 +00002464What's New in Python 2.1 alpha 2?
2465=================================
Tim Peters40ead762001-01-27 05:35:26 +00002466
Tim Petersd7b5e882001-01-25 03:36:26 +00002467Core language, builtins, and interpreter
2468
Jeremy Hylton4589bd82001-02-01 20:38:45 +00002469- Scopes nest. If a name is used in a function or class, but is not
2470 local, the definition in the nearest enclosing function scope will
2471 be used. One consequence of this change is that lambda statements
2472 could reference variables in the namespaces where the lambda is
2473 defined. In some unusual cases, this change will break code.
2474
2475 In all previous version of Python, names were resolved in exactly
2476 three namespaces -- the local namespace, the global namespace, and
Jeremy Hyltond6b1cf92001-02-02 20:06:28 +00002477 the builtin namespace. According to this old definition, if a
Jeremy Hylton4589bd82001-02-01 20:38:45 +00002478 function A is defined within a function B, the names bound in B are
2479 not visible in A. The new rules make names bound in B visible in A,
2480 unless A contains a name binding that hides the binding in B.
2481
2482 Section 4.1 of the reference manual describes the new scoping rules
2483 in detail. The test script in Lib/test/test_scope.py demonstrates
2484 some of the effects of the change.
2485
2486 The new rules will cause existing code to break if it defines nested
2487 functions where an outer function has local variables with the same
2488 name as globals or builtins used by the inner function. Example:
2489
2490 def munge(str):
2491 def helper(x):
2492 return str(x)
2493 if type(str) != type(''):
2494 str = helper(str)
2495 return str.strip()
2496
2497 Under the old rules, the name str in helper() is bound to the
2498 builtin function str(). Under the new rules, it will be bound to
2499 the argument named str and an error will occur when helper() is
2500 called.
2501
Jeremy Hyltond6b1cf92001-02-02 20:06:28 +00002502- The compiler will report a SyntaxError if "from ... import *" occurs
2503 in a function or class scope. The language reference has documented
2504 that this case is illegal, but the compiler never checked for it.
2505 The recent introduction of nested scope makes the meaning of this
2506 form of name binding ambiguous. In a future release, the compiler
2507 may allow this form when there is no possibility of ambiguity.
2508
Tim Peters40ead762001-01-27 05:35:26 +00002509- repr(string) is easier to read, now using hex escapes instead of octal,
2510 and using \t, \n and \r instead of \011, \012 and \015 (respectively):
2511
2512 >>> "\texample \r\n" + chr(0) + chr(255)
2513 '\texample \r\n\x00\xff' # in 2.1
2514 '\011example \015\012\000\377' # in 2.0
2515
Moshe Zadka6af0ce02001-01-29 06:41:00 +00002516- Functions are now compared and hashed by identity, not by value, since
2517 the func_code attribute is writable.
2518
Fred Drakefb9d7122001-02-01 20:00:40 +00002519- Weak references (PEP 205) have been added. This involves a few
2520 changes in the core, an extension module (_weakref), and a Python
2521 module (weakref). The weakref module is the public interface. It
2522 includes support for "explicit" weak references, proxy objects, and
2523 mappings with weakly held values.
2524
Jeremy Hylton0072d5a2001-02-01 22:53:15 +00002525- A 'continue' statement can now appear in a try block within the body
2526 of a loop. It is still not possible to use continue in a finally
Tim Peters9ea17ac2001-02-02 05:57:15 +00002527 clause.
Jeremy Hylton0072d5a2001-02-01 22:53:15 +00002528
Tim Petersd7b5e882001-01-25 03:36:26 +00002529Standard library
2530
Barry Warsaw30dbd142001-01-31 22:14:01 +00002531- mailbox.py now has a new class, PortableUnixMailbox which is
2532 identical to UnixMailbox but uses a more portable scheme for
2533 determining From_ separators. Also, the constructors for all the
2534 classes in this module have a new optional `factory' argument, which
2535 is a callable used when new message classes must be instantiated by
2536 the next() method.
2537
Tim Petersd7b5e882001-01-25 03:36:26 +00002538- random.py is now self-contained, and offers all the functionality of
2539 the now-deprecated whrandom.py. See the docs for details. random.py
2540 also supports new functions getstate() and setstate(), for saving
Tim Petersd52269b2001-01-25 06:23:18 +00002541 and restoring the internal state of the generator; and jumpahead(n),
2542 for quickly forcing the internal state to be the same as if n calls to
2543 random() had been made. The latter is particularly useful for multi-
2544 threaded programs, creating one instance of the random.Random() class for
2545 each thread, then using .jumpahead() to force each instance to use a
2546 non-overlapping segment of the full period.
Tim Petersd7b5e882001-01-25 03:36:26 +00002547
Tim Peters0de88fc2001-02-01 04:59:18 +00002548- random.py's seed() function is new. For bit-for-bit compatibility with
2549 prior releases, use the whseed function instead. The new seed function
2550 addresses two problems: (1) The old function couldn't produce more than
2551 about 2**24 distinct internal states; the new one about 2**45 (the best
2552 that can be done in the Wichmann-Hill generator). (2) The old function
2553 sometimes produced identical internal states when passed distinct
2554 integers, and there was no simple way to predict when that would happen;
2555 the new one guarantees to produce distinct internal states for all
2556 arguments in [0, 27814431486576L).
2557
Jeremy Hylton4c4fda02001-02-02 03:29:24 +00002558- The socket module now supports raw packets on Linux. The socket
2559 family is AF_PACKET.
2560
Tim Peters9ea17ac2001-02-02 05:57:15 +00002561- test_capi.py is a start at running tests of the Python C API. The tests
2562 are implemented by the new Modules/_testmodule.c.
2563
Jeremy Hyltond6b1cf92001-02-02 20:06:28 +00002564- A new extension module, _symtable, provides provisional access to the
2565 internal symbol table used by the Python compiler. A higher-level
2566 interface will be added on top of _symtable in a future release.
2567
Andrew M. Kuchlingdebc3522001-02-22 15:53:21 +00002568- Removed the obsolete soundex module.
2569
Martin v. Löwis2a5130e2001-02-27 04:21:58 +00002570- xml.dom.minidom now uses the standard DOM exceptions. Node supports
2571 the isSameNode method; NamedNodeMap the get method.
2572
2573- xml.sax.expatreader supports the lexical handler property; it
2574 generates comment, startCDATA, and endCDATA events.
2575
Tim Petersee826f82001-01-31 19:39:44 +00002576Windows changes
2577
2578- Build procedure: the zlib project is built in a different way that
2579 ensures the zlib header files used can no longer get out of synch with
Tim Peters9ea17ac2001-02-02 05:57:15 +00002580 the zlib binary used. See PCbuild\readme.txt for details. Your old
2581 zlib-related directories can be deleted; you'll need to download fresh
2582 source for zlib and unpack it into a new directory.
Tim Petersee826f82001-01-31 19:39:44 +00002583
Tim Peters9ea17ac2001-02-02 05:57:15 +00002584- Build: New subproject _test for the benefit of test_capi.py (see above).
2585
Tim Petersb16c56f2001-02-02 21:24:51 +00002586- Build: New subproject _symtable, for new DLL _symtable.pyd (a nascent
2587 interface to some Python compiler internals).
2588
2589- Build: Subproject ucnhash is gone, since the code was folded into the
Tim Peters9ea17ac2001-02-02 05:57:15 +00002590 unicodedata subproject.
Tim Petersd7b5e882001-01-25 03:36:26 +00002591
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002592What's New in Python 2.1 alpha 1?
2593=================================
2594
2595Core language, builtins, and interpreter
2596
Marc-André Lemburgebb195b2001-01-20 10:34:52 +00002597- There is a new Unicode companion to the PyObject_Str() API
2598 called PyObject_Unicode(). It behaves in the same way as the
2599 former, but assures that the returned value is an Unicode object
2600 (applying the usual coercion if necessary).
Marc-André Lemburgad7c98e2001-01-17 17:09:53 +00002601
Guido van Rossumf98eda02001-01-17 15:54:45 +00002602- The comparison operators support "rich comparison overloading" (PEP
2603 207). C extension types can provide a rich comparison function in
2604 the new tp_richcompare slot in the type object. The cmp() function
2605 and the C function PyObject_Compare() first try the new rich
2606 comparison operators before trying the old 3-way comparison. There
2607 is also a new C API PyObject_RichCompare() (which also falls back on
2608 the old 3-way comparison, but does not constrain the outcome of the
2609 rich comparison to a Boolean result).
2610
2611 The rich comparison function takes two objects (at least one of
2612 which is guaranteed to have the type that provided the function) and
2613 an integer indicating the opcode, which can be Py_LT, Py_LE, Py_EQ,
2614 Py_NE, Py_GT, Py_GE (for <, <=, ==, !=, >, >=), and returns a Python
2615 object, which may be NotImplemented (in which case the tp_compare
2616 slot function is used as a fallback, if defined).
2617
2618 Classes can overload individual comparison operators by defining one
2619 or more of the methods__lt__, __le__, __eq__, __ne__, __gt__,
Guido van Rossuma88479f2001-01-18 14:28:08 +00002620 __ge__. There are no explicit "reflected argument" versions of
2621 these; instead, __lt__ and __gt__ are each other's reflection,
2622 likewise for__le__ and __ge__; __eq__ and __ne__ are their own
2623 reflection (similar at the C level). No other implications are
2624 made; in particular, Python does not assume that == is the Boolean
2625 inverse of !=, or that < is the Boolean inverse of >=. This makes
2626 it possible to define types with partial orderings.
Guido van Rossumf98eda02001-01-17 15:54:45 +00002627
2628 Classes or types that want to implement (in)equality tests but not
2629 the ordering operators (i.e. unordered types) should implement ==
2630 and !=, and raise an error for the ordering operators.
2631
Guido van Rossuma88479f2001-01-18 14:28:08 +00002632 It is possible to define types whose rich comparison results are not
Guido van Rossumf98eda02001-01-17 15:54:45 +00002633 Boolean; e.g. a matrix type might want to return a matrix of bits
2634 for A < B, giving elementwise comparisons. Such types should ensure
2635 that any interpretation of their value in a Boolean context raises
2636 an exception, e.g. by defining __nonzero__ (or the tp_nonzero slot
2637 at the C level) to always raise an exception.
2638
Guido van Rossuma88479f2001-01-18 14:28:08 +00002639- Complex numbers use rich comparisons to define == and != but raise
2640 an exception for <, <=, > and >=. Unfortunately, this also means
2641 that cmp() of two complex numbers raises an exception when the two
2642 numbers differ. Since it is not mathematically meaningful to compare
2643 complex numbers except for equality, I hope that this doesn't break
2644 too much code.
2645
Tim Peters3389f192001-02-18 08:48:49 +00002646- The outcome of comparing non-numeric objects of different types is
Tim Peters14495852001-02-18 08:28:33 +00002647 not defined by the language, other than that it's arbitrary but
2648 consistent (see the Reference Manual). An implementation detail changed
2649 in 2.1a1 such that None now compares less than any other object. Code
2650 relying on this new behavior (like code that relied on the previous
2651 behavior) does so at its own risk.
2652
Barry Warsaw573b5412001-01-15 20:43:18 +00002653- Functions and methods now support getting and setting arbitrarily
2654 named attributes (PEP 232). Functions have a new __dict__
2655 (a.k.a. func_dict) which hold the function attributes. Methods get
2656 and set attributes on their underlying im_func. It is a TypeError
2657 to set an attribute on a bound method.
2658
Guido van Rossum051e3352001-01-15 19:11:10 +00002659- The xrange() object implementation has been improved so that
2660 xrange(sys.maxint) can be used on 64-bit platforms. There's still a
2661 limitation that in this case len(xrange(sys.maxint)) can't be
2662 calculated, but the common idiom "for i in xrange(sys.maxint)" will
2663 work fine as long as the index i doesn't actually reach 2**31.
2664 (Python uses regular ints for sequence and string indices; fixing
2665 that is much more work.)
2666
Guido van Rossum1cc8f832001-01-12 16:25:08 +00002667- Two changes to from...import:
2668
Guido van Rossumba381232001-02-03 15:06:40 +00002669 1) "from M import X" now works even if (after loading module M)
2670 sys.modules['M'] is not a real module; it's basically a getattr()
2671 operation with AttributeError exceptions changed into ImportError.
Guido van Rossum1cc8f832001-01-12 16:25:08 +00002672
2673 2) "from M import *" now looks for M.__all__ to decide which names to
2674 import; if M.__all__ doesn't exist, it uses M.__dict__.keys() but
2675 filters out names starting with '_' as before. Whether or not
2676 __all__ exists, there's no restriction on the type of M.
2677
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002678- File objects have a new method, xreadlines(). This is the fastest
2679 way to iterate over all lines in a file:
2680
2681 for line in file.xreadlines():
2682 ...do something to line...
2683
2684 See the xreadlines module (mentioned below) for how to do this for
2685 other file-like objects.
2686
2687- Even if you don't use file.xreadlines(), you may expect a speedup on
2688 line-by-line input. The file.readline() method has been optimized
Tim Petersf29b64d2001-01-15 06:33:19 +00002689 quite a bit in platform-specific ways: on systems (like Linux) that
2690 support flockfile(), getc_unlocked(), and funlockfile(), those are
2691 used by default. On systems (like Windows) without getc_unlocked(),
2692 a complicated (but still thread-safe) method using fgets() is used by
2693 default.
2694
Tim Petersd52269b2001-01-25 06:23:18 +00002695 You can force use of the fgets() method by #define'ing
2696 USE_FGETS_IN_GETLINE at build time (it may be faster than
Tim Petersf29b64d2001-01-15 06:33:19 +00002697 getc_unlocked()).
2698
Tim Petersd52269b2001-01-25 06:23:18 +00002699 You can force fgets() not to be used by #define'ing
2700 DONT_USE_FGETS_IN_GETLINE (this is the first thing to try if std test
Tim Petersf29b64d2001-01-15 06:33:19 +00002701 test_bufio.py fails -- and let us know if it does!).
2702
2703- In addition, the fileinput module, while still slower than the other
2704 methods on most platforms, has been sped up too, by using
2705 file.readlines(sizehint).
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002706
2707- Support for run-time warnings has been added, including a new
2708 command line option (-W) to specify the disposition of warnings.
2709 See the description of the warnings module below.
2710
2711- Extensive changes have been made to the coercion code. This mostly
2712 affects extension modules (which can now implement mixed-type
2713 numerical operators without having to use coercion), but
2714 occasionally, in boundary cases the coercion semantics have changed
2715 subtly. Since this was a terrible gray area of the language, this
Guido van Rossumae72d872001-01-11 15:00:14 +00002716 is considered an improvement. Also note that __rcmp__ is no longer
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002717 supported -- instead of calling __rcmp__, __cmp__ is called with
Guido van Rossuma88479f2001-01-18 14:28:08 +00002718 reflected arguments.
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002719
Guido van Rossumf98eda02001-01-17 15:54:45 +00002720- In connection with the coercion changes, a new built-in singleton
2721 object, NotImplemented is defined. This can be returned for
2722 operations that wish to indicate they are not implemented for a
2723 particular combination of arguments. From C, this is
2724 Py_NotImplemented.
2725
Martin v. Löwisbe4c0f52001-01-04 20:30:56 +00002726- The interpreter accepts now bytecode files on the command line even
2727 if they do not have a .pyc or .pyo extension. On Linux, after executing
2728
Martin v. Löwise214baa2001-02-04 22:37:56 +00002729import imp,sys,string
2730magic = string.join(["\\x%.2x" % ord(c) for c in imp.get_magic()],"")
2731reg = ':pyc:M::%s::%s:' % (magic, sys.executable)
2732open("/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/register","wb").write(reg)
Martin v. Löwisbe4c0f52001-01-04 20:30:56 +00002733
2734 any byte code file can be used as an executable (i.e. as an argument
2735 to execve(2)).
2736
Tim Peters9940b802000-12-01 07:59:35 +00002737- %[xXo] formats of negative Python longs now produce a sign
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002738 character. In 1.6 and earlier, they never produced a sign,
2739 and raised an error if the value of the long was too large
2740 to fit in a Python int. In 2.0, they produced a sign if and
2741 only if too large to fit in an int. This was inconsistent
2742 across platforms (because the size of an int varies across
2743 platforms), and inconsistent with hex() and oct(). Example:
2744
2745 >>> "%x" % -0x42L
Tim Peters9940b802000-12-01 07:59:35 +00002746 '-42' # in 2.1
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002747 'ffffffbe' # in 2.0 and before, on 32-bit machines
2748 >>> hex(-0x42L)
2749 '-0x42L' # in all versions of Python
2750
Tim Peters9940b802000-12-01 07:59:35 +00002751 The behavior of %d formats for negative Python longs remains
2752 the same as in 2.0 (although in 1.6 and before, they raised
2753 an error if the long didn't fit in a Python int).
2754
2755 %u formats don't make sense for Python longs, but are allowed
2756 and treated the same as %d in 2.1. In 2.0, a negative long
2757 formatted via %u produced a sign if and only if too large to
2758 fit in an int. In 1.6 and earlier, a negative long formatted
2759 via %u raised an error if it was too big to fit in an int.
2760
Guido van Rossum3661d392000-12-12 22:10:31 +00002761- Dictionary objects have an odd new method, popitem(). This removes
2762 an arbitrary item from the dictionary and returns it (in the form of
2763 a (key, value) pair). This can be useful for algorithms that use a
2764 dictionary as a bag of "to do" items and repeatedly need to pick one
2765 item. Such algorithms normally end up running in quadratic time;
2766 using popitem() they can usually be made to run in linear time.
2767
Tim Peters36cdad12000-12-29 02:06:45 +00002768Standard library
2769
Thomas Woutersfe385252001-01-19 23:16:56 +00002770- In the time module, the time argument to the functions strftime,
2771 localtime, gmtime, asctime and ctime is now optional, defaulting to
2772 the current time (in the local timezone).
2773
Guido van Rossumda91f222001-01-15 16:36:08 +00002774- The ftplib module now defaults to passive mode, which is deemed a
2775 more useful default given that clients are often inside firewalls
2776 these days. Note that this could break if ftplib is used to connect
2777 to a *server* that is inside a firewall, from outside; this is
2778 expected to be a very rare situation. To fix that, you can call
2779 ftp.set_pasv(0).
2780
Martin v. Löwis10a27872001-01-13 09:54:41 +00002781- The module site now treats .pth files not only for path configuration,
2782 but also supports extensions to the initialization code: Lines starting
2783 with import are executed.
2784
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002785- There's a new module, warnings, which implements a mechanism for
2786 issuing and filtering warnings. There are some new built-in
2787 exceptions that serve as warning categories, and a new command line
2788 option, -W, to control warnings (e.g. -Wi ignores all warnings, -We
2789 turns warnings into errors). warnings.warn(message[, category])
2790 issues a warning message; this can also be called from C as
2791 PyErr_Warn(category, message).
2792
2793- A new module xreadlines was added. This exports a single factory
2794 function, xreadlines(). The intention is that this code is the
2795 absolutely fastest way to iterate over all lines in an open
2796 file(-like) object:
2797
2798 import xreadlines
2799 for line in xreadlines.xreadlines(file):
2800 ...do something to line...
2801
2802 This is equivalent to the previous the speed record holder using
2803 file.readlines(sizehint). Note that if file is a real file object
2804 (as opposed to a file-like object), this is equivalent:
2805
2806 for line in file.xreadlines():
2807 ...do something to line...
2808
Tim Peters36cdad12000-12-29 02:06:45 +00002809- The bisect module has new functions bisect_left, insort_left,
2810 bisect_right and insort_right. The old names bisect and insort
2811 are now aliases for bisect_right and insort_right. XXX_right
2812 and XXX_left methods differ in what happens when the new element
2813 compares equal to one or more elements already in the list: the
2814 XXX_left methods insert to the left, the XXX_right methods to the
Tim Peters742bb6f2001-01-05 08:05:32 +00002815 right. Code that doesn't care where equal elements end up should
2816 continue to use the old, short names ("bisect" and "insort").
Tim Peters36cdad12000-12-29 02:06:45 +00002817
Andrew M. Kuchlingf6f3a892001-01-13 14:53:34 +00002818- The new curses.panel module wraps the panel library that forms part
2819 of SYSV curses and ncurses. Contributed by Thomas Gellekum.
2820
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002821- The SocketServer module now sets the allow_reuse_address flag by
2822 default in the TCPServer class.
2823
2824- A new function, sys._getframe(), returns the stack frame pointer of
2825 the caller. This is intended only as a building block for
2826 higher-level mechanisms such as string interpolation.
2827
Martin v. Löwis2a5130e2001-02-27 04:21:58 +00002828- The pyexpat module supports a number of new handlers, which are
2829 available only in expat 1.2. If invocation of a callback fails, it
2830 will report an additional frame in the traceback. Parser objects
2831 participate now in garbage collection. If expat reports an unknown
2832 encoding, pyexpat will try to use a Python codec; that works only
2833 for single-byte charsets. The parser type objects is exposed as
2834 XMLParserObject.
2835
2836- xml.dom now offers standard definitions for symbolic node type and
2837 exception code constants, and a hierarchy of DOM exceptions. minidom
2838 was adjusted to use them.
2839
2840- The conformance of xml.dom.minidom to the DOM specification was
2841 improved. It detects a number of additional error cases; the
2842 previous/next relationship works even when the tree is modified;
2843 Node supports the normalize() method; NamedNodeMap, DocumentType and
2844 DOMImplementation classes were added; Element supports the
2845 hasAttribute and hasAttributeNS methods; and Text supports the splitText
2846 method.
2847
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002848Build issues
2849
Guido van Rossum1e33bdc2001-01-23 03:17:00 +00002850- For Unix (and Unix-compatible) builds, configuration and building of
2851 extension modules is now greatly automated. Rather than having to
2852 edit the Modules/Setup file to indicate which modules should be
2853 built and where their include files and libraries are, a
2854 distutils-based setup.py script now takes care of building most
2855 extension modules. All extension modules built this way are built
2856 as shared libraries. Only a few modules that must be linked
2857 statically are still listed in the Setup file; you won't need to
2858 edit their configuration.
2859
2860- Python should now build out of the box on Cygwin. If it doesn't,
2861 mail to Jason Tishler (jlt63 at users.sourceforge.net).
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002862
2863- Python now always uses its own (renamed) implementation of getopt()
2864 -- there's too much variation among C library getopt()
2865 implementations.
2866
2867- C++ compilers are better supported; the CXX macro is always set to a
2868 C++ compiler if one is found.
Tim Peters36cdad12000-12-29 02:06:45 +00002869
Tim Petersd92dfe02000-12-12 01:18:41 +00002870Windows changes
2871
2872- select module: By default under Windows, a select() call
2873 can specify no more than 64 sockets. Python now boosts
2874 this Microsoft default to 512. If you need even more than
2875 that, see the MS docs (you'll need to #define FD_SETSIZE
2876 and recompile Python from source).
2877
Guido van Rossumf61f1662001-01-10 20:13:55 +00002878- Support for Windows 3.1, DOS and OS/2 is gone. The Lib/dos-8x3
2879 subdirectory is no more!
2880
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002881
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002882What's New in Python 2.0?
Fred Drake1a640502000-10-16 20:27:25 +00002883=========================
Guido van Rossum61000331997-08-15 04:39:58 +00002884
Guido van Rossum8ed602b2000-09-01 22:34:33 +00002885Below is a list of all relevant changes since release 1.6. Older
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002886changes are in the file HISTORY. If you are making the jump directly
2887from Python 1.5.2 to 2.0, make sure to read the section for 1.6 in the
2888HISTORY file! Many important changes listed there.
Guido van Rossum61000331997-08-15 04:39:58 +00002889
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002890Alternatively, a good overview of the changes between 1.5.2 and 2.0 is
2891the document "What's New in Python 2.0" by Kuchling and Moshe Zadka:
2892http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/python/writing/new-python/.
Guido van Rossum1f83cce1997-10-06 21:04:35 +00002893
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00002894--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.pythonlabs.com/~guido/)
Guido van Rossum437cfe81999-04-08 20:17:57 +00002895
2896======================================================================
2897
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002898What's new in 2.0 (since release candidate 1)?
2899==============================================
2900
2901Standard library
2902
2903- The copy_reg module was modified to clarify its intended use: to
2904 register pickle support for extension types, not for classes.
2905 pickle() will raise a TypeError if it is passed a class.
2906
2907- Fixed a bug in gettext's "normalize and expand" code that prevented
2908 it from finding an existing .mo file.
2909
2910- Restored support for HTTP/0.9 servers in httplib.
2911
Tim Peters989b7b92000-10-16 20:24:53 +00002912- The math module was changed to stop raising OverflowError in case of
2913 underflow, and return 0 instead in underflow cases. Whether Python
2914 used to raise OverflowError in case of underflow was platform-
2915 dependent (it did when the platform math library set errno to ERANGE
2916 on underflow).
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002917
2918- Fixed a bug in StringIO that occurred when the file position was not
2919 at the end of the file and write() was called with enough data to
2920 extend past the end of the file.
2921
2922- Fixed a bug that caused Tkinter error messages to get lost on
2923 Windows. The bug was fixed by replacing direct use of
2924 interp->result with Tcl_GetStringResult(interp).
2925
2926- Fixed bug in urllib2 that caused it to fail when it received an HTTP
2927 redirect response.
2928
2929- Several changes were made to distutils: Some debugging code was
2930 removed from util. Fixed the installer used when an external zip
2931 program (like WinZip) is not found; the source code for this
2932 installer is in Misc/distutils. check_lib() was modified to behave
2933 more like AC_CHECK_LIB by add other_libraries() as a parameter. The
2934 test for whether installed modules are on sys.path was changed to
2935 use both normcase() and normpath().
2936
Jeremy Hyltond867a2c2000-10-16 20:41:38 +00002937- Several minor bugs were fixed in the xml package (the minidom,
2938 pulldom, expatreader, and saxutils modules).
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002939
2940- The regression test driver (regrtest.py) behavior when invoked with
2941 -l changed: It now reports a count of objects that are recognized as
2942 garbage but not freed by the garbage collector.
2943
Tim Peters989b7b92000-10-16 20:24:53 +00002944- The regression test for the math module was changed to test
2945 exceptional behavior when the test is run in verbose mode. Python
2946 cannot yet guarantee consistent exception behavior across platforms,
2947 so the exception part of test_math is run only in verbose mode, and
2948 may fail on your platform.
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002949
2950Internals
2951
2952- PyOS_CheckStack() has been disabled on Win64, where it caused
2953 test_sre to fail.
2954
2955Build issues
2956
2957- Changed compiler flags, so that gcc is always invoked with -Wall and
2958 -Wstrict-prototypes. Users compiling Python with GCC should see
2959 exactly one warning, except if they have passed configure the
Tim Peters989b7b92000-10-16 20:24:53 +00002960 --with-pydebug flag. The expected warning is for getopt() in
Tim Petersadfb94f2000-10-16 20:51:33 +00002961 Modules/main.c. This warning will be fixed for Python 2.1.
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002962
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002963- Fixed configure to add -threads argument during linking on OSF1.
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002964
2965Tools and other miscellany
2966
2967- The compiler in Tools/compiler was updated to support the new
2968 language features introduced in 2.0: extended print statement, list
2969 comprehensions, and augmented assignments. The new compiler should
2970 also be backwards compatible with Python 1.5.2; the compiler will
2971 always generate code for the version of the interpreter it runs
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00002972 under.
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002973
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002974What's new in 2.0 release candidate 1 (since beta 2)?
2975=====================================================
2976
Jeremy Hylton6040aaa2000-10-09 21:27:22 +00002977What is release candidate 1?
2978
2979We believe that release candidate 1 will fix all known bugs that we
2980intend to fix for the 2.0 final release. This release should be a bit
2981more stable than the previous betas. We would like to see even more
2982widespread testing before the final release, so we are producing this
2983release candidate. The final release will be exactly the same unless
2984any show-stopping (or brown bag) bugs are found by testers of the
2985release candidate.
2986
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002987All the changes since the last beta release are bug fixes or changes
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00002988to support building Python for specific platforms.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00002989
2990Core language, builtins, and interpreter
2991
2992- A bug that caused crashes when __coerce__ was used with augmented
2993 assignment, e.g. +=, was fixed.
2994
2995- Raise ZeroDivisionError when raising zero to a negative number,
2996 e.g. 0.0 ** -2.0. Note that math.pow is unrelated to the builtin
2997 power operator and the result of math.pow(0.0, -2.0) will vary by
2998 platform. On Linux, it raises a ValueError.
2999
3000- A bug in Unicode string interpolation was fixed that occasionally
3001 caused errors with formats including "%%". For example, the
3002 following expression "%% %s" % u"abc" no longer raises a TypeError.
3003
3004- Compilation of deeply nested expressions raises MemoryError instead
3005 of SyntaxError, e.g. eval("[" * 50 + "]" * 50).
3006
3007- In 2.0b2 on Windows, the interpreter wrote .pyc files in text mode,
3008 rendering them useless. They are now written in binary mode again.
3009
3010Standard library
3011
3012- Keyword arguments are now accepted for most pattern and match object
3013 methods in SRE, the standard regular expression engine.
3014
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00003015- In SRE, fixed error with negative lookahead and lookbehind that
Jeremy Hylton32e20ff2000-10-09 19:48:11 +00003016 manifested itself as a runtime error in patterns like "(?<!abc)(def)".
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00003017
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00003018- Several bugs in the Unicode handling and error handling in _tkinter
3019 were fixed.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00003020
3021- Fix memory management errors in Merge() and Tkapp_Call() routines.
3022
3023- Several changes were made to cStringIO to make it compatible with
3024 the file-like object interface and with StringIO. If operations are
3025 performed on a closed object, an exception is raised. The truncate
3026 method now accepts a position argument and readline accepts a size
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00003027 argument.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00003028
3029- There were many changes made to the linuxaudiodev module and its
3030 test suite; as a result, a short, unexpected audio sample should now
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00003031 play when the regression test is run.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00003032
3033 Note that this module is named poorly, because it should work
3034 correctly on any platform that supports the Open Sound System
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00003035 (OSS).
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00003036
3037 The module now raises exceptions when errors occur instead of
3038 crashing. It also defines the AFMT_A_LAW format (logarithmic A-law
3039 audio) and defines a getptr() method that calls the
3040 SNDCTL_DSP_GETxPTR ioctl defined in the OSS Programmer's Guide.
3041
3042- The library_version attribute, introduced in an earlier beta, was
3043 removed because it can not be supported with early versions of the C
3044 readline library, which provides no way to determine the version at
3045 compile-time.
3046
3047- The binascii module is now enabled on Win64.
3048
Tim Peters46446d62000-10-09 21:19:31 +00003049- tokenize.py no longer suffers "recursion depth" errors when parsing
3050 programs with very long string literals.
3051
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00003052Internals
3053
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00003054- Fixed several buffer overflow vulnerabilities in calculate_path(),
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00003055 which is called when the interpreter starts up to determine where
3056 the standard library is installed. These vulnerabilities affect all
3057 previous versions of Python and can be exploited by setting very
3058 long values for PYTHONHOME or argv[0]. The risk is greatest for a
3059 setuid Python script, although use of the wrapper in
3060 Misc/setuid-prog.c will eliminate the vulnerability.
3061
3062- Fixed garbage collection bugs in instance creation that were
3063 triggered when errors occurred during initialization. The solution,
3064 applied in cPickle and in PyInstance_New(), is to call
3065 PyObject_GC_Init() after the initialization of the object's
3066 container attributes is complete.
3067
3068- pyexpat adds definitions of PyModule_AddStringConstant and
3069 PyModule_AddObject if the Python version is less than 2.0, which
3070 provides compatibility with PyXML on Python 1.5.2.
3071
3072- If the platform has a bogus definition for LONG_BIT (the number of
3073 bits in a long), an error will be reported at compile time.
3074
3075- Fix bugs in _PyTuple_Resize() which caused hard-to-interpret garbage
3076 collection crashes and possibly other, unreported crashes.
3077
3078- Fixed a memory leak in _PyUnicode_Fini().
3079
3080Build issues
3081
3082- configure now accepts a --with-suffix option that specifies the
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00003083 executable suffix. This is useful for builds on Cygwin and Mac OS
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00003084 X, for example.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00003085
3086- The mmap.PAGESIZE constant is now initialized using sysconf when
3087 possible, which eliminates a dependency on -lucb for Reliant UNIX.
3088
3089- The md5 file should now compile on all platforms.
3090
3091- The select module now compiles on platforms that do not define
3092 POLLRDNORM and related constants.
3093
3094- Darwin (Mac OS X): Initial support for static builds on this
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00003095 platform.
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00003096
Jeremy Hylton10921202000-10-09 18:34:12 +00003097- BeOS: A number of changes were made to the build and installation
3098 process. ar-fake now operates on a directory of object files.
3099 dl_export.h is gone, and its macros now appear on the mwcc command
3100 line during build on PPC BeOS.
3101
Jeremy Hyltond6e20232000-10-16 20:08:38 +00003102- Platform directory in lib/python2.0 is "plat-beos5" (or
Jeremy Hylton10921202000-10-09 18:34:12 +00003103 "plat-beos4", if building on BeOS 4.5), rather than "plat-beos".
Jeremy Hyltoned9e6442000-10-09 18:26:42 +00003104
3105- Cygwin: Support for shared libraries, Tkinter, and sockets.
3106
3107- SunOS 4.1.4_JL: Fix test for directory existence in configure.
3108
3109Tools and other miscellany
3110
3111- Removed debugging prints from main used with freeze.
3112
Tim Peters46446d62000-10-09 21:19:31 +00003113- IDLE auto-indent no longer crashes when it encounters Unicode
3114 characters.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003115
3116What's new in 2.0 beta 2 (since beta 1)?
3117========================================
3118
3119Core language, builtins, and interpreter
3120
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +00003121- Add support for unbounded ints in %d,i,u,x,X,o formats; for example
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003122 "%d" % 2L**64 == "18446744073709551616".
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003123
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003124- Add -h and -V command line options to print the usage message and
3125 Python version number and exit immediately.
3126
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003127- eval() and exec accept Unicode objects as code parameters.
3128
3129- getattr() and setattr() now also accept Unicode objects for the
3130 attribute name, which are converted to strings using the default
3131 encoding before lookup.
3132
3133- Multiplication on string and Unicode now does proper bounds
3134 checking; e.g. 'a' * 65536 * 65536 will raise ValueError, "repeated
3135 string is too long."
3136
3137- Better error message when continue is found in try statement in a
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00003138 loop.
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003139
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003140
3141Standard library and extensions
3142
Guido van Rossum5b08f132001-04-16 02:05:23 +00003143- socket module: the OpenSSL code now adds support for RAND_status()
3144 and EGD (Entropy Gathering Device).
3145
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003146- array: reverse() method of array now works. buffer_info() now does
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003147 argument checking; it still takes no arguments.
3148
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003149- asyncore/asynchat: Included most recent version from Sam Rushing.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003150
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003151- cgi: Accept '&' or ';' as separator characters when parsing form data.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003152
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003153- CGIHTTPServer: Now works on Windows (and perhaps even Mac).
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003154
3155- ConfigParser: When reading the file, options spelled in upper case
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003156 letters are now correctly converted to lowercase.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003157
3158- copy: Copy Unicode objects atomically.
3159
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003160- cPickle: Fail gracefully when copy_reg can't be imported.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003161
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003162- cStringIO: Implemented readlines() method.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003163
Fred Drake67233bc2000-09-26 16:40:27 +00003164- dbm: Add get() and setdefault() methods to dbm object. Add constant
3165 `library' to module that names the library used. Added doc strings
3166 and method names to error messages. Uses configure to determine
3167 which ndbm.h file to include; Berkeley DB's nbdm and GDBM's ndbm is
3168 now available options.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003169
3170- distutils: Update to version 0.9.3.
3171
3172- dl: Add several dl.RTLD_ constants.
3173
3174- fpectl: Now supported on FreeBSD.
3175
3176- gc: Add DEBUG_SAVEALL option. When enabled all garbage objects
3177 found by the collector will be saved in gc.garbage. This is useful
3178 for debugging a program that creates reference cycles.
3179
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003180- httplib: Three changes: Restore support for set_debuglevel feature
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003181 of HTTP class. Do not close socket on zero-length response. Do not
3182 crash when server sends invalid content-length header.
3183
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003184- mailbox: Mailbox class conforms better to qmail specifications.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003185
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003186- marshal: When reading a short, sign-extend on platforms where shorts
3187 are bigger than 16 bits. When reading a long, repair the unportable
3188 sign extension that was being done for 64-bit machines. (It assumed
3189 that signed right shift sign-extends.)
3190
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003191- operator: Add contains(), invert(), __invert__() as aliases for
3192 __contains__(), inv(), and __inv__() respectively.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003193
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003194- os: Add support for popen2() and popen3() on all platforms where
3195 fork() exists. (popen4() is still in the works.)
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003196
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003197- os: (Windows only:) Add startfile() function that acts like double-
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +00003198 clicking on a file in Explorer (or passing the file name to the
3199 DOS "start" command).
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003200
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003201- os.path: (Windows, DOS:) Treat trailing colon correctly in
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +00003202 os.path.join. os.path.join("a:", "b") yields "a:b".
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003203
3204- pickle: Now raises ValueError when an invalid pickle that contains
3205 a non-string repr where a string repr was expected. This behavior
3206 matches cPickle.
3207
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003208- posixfile: Remove broken __del__() method.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003209
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003210- py_compile: support CR+LF line terminators in source file.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003211
3212- readline: Does not immediately exit when ^C is hit when readline and
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003213 threads are configured. Adds definition of rl_library_version. (The
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003214 latter addition requires GNU readline 2.2 or later.)
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003215
3216- rfc822: Domain literals returned by AddrlistClass method
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003217 getdomainliteral() are now properly wrapped in brackets.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003218
3219- site: sys.setdefaultencoding() should only be called in case the
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +00003220 standard default encoding ("ascii") is changed. This saves quite a
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003221 few cycles during startup since the first call to
3222 setdefaultencoding() will initialize the codec registry and the
3223 encodings package.
3224
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003225- socket: Support for size hint in readlines() method of object returned
3226 by makefile().
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003227
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003228- sre: Added experimental expand() method to match objects. Does not
Jeremy Hylton625915e2000-10-02 13:43:33 +00003229 use buffer interface on Unicode strings. Does not hang if group id
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003230 is followed by whitespace.
3231
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00003232- StringIO: Size hint in readlines() is now supported as documented.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003233
3234- struct: Check ranges for bytes and shorts.
3235
3236- urllib: Improved handling of win32 proxy settings. Fixed quote and
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003237 quote_plus functions so that the always encode a comma.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003238
3239- Tkinter: Image objects are now guaranteed to have unique ids. Set
3240 event.delta to zero if Tk version doesn't support mousewheel.
3241 Removed some debugging prints.
3242
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003243- UserList: now implements __contains__().
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003244
Fred Drake67233bc2000-09-26 16:40:27 +00003245- webbrowser: On Windows, use os.startfile() instead of os.popen(),
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003246 which works around a bug in Norton AntiVirus 2000 that leads directly
3247 to a Blue Screen freeze.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003248
3249- xml: New version detection code allows PyXML to override standard
3250 XML package if PyXML version is greater than 0.6.1.
3251
Fred Drake64bb3802000-09-26 16:21:35 +00003252- xml.dom: DOM level 1 support for basic XML. Includes xml.dom.minidom
3253 (conventional DOM), and xml.dom.pulldom, which allows building the DOM
3254 tree only for nodes which are sufficiently interesting to a specific
3255 application. Does not provide the HTML-specific extensions. Still
3256 undocumented.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003257
Fred Drake64bb3802000-09-26 16:21:35 +00003258- xml.sax: SAX 2 support for Python, including all the handler
3259 interfaces needed to process XML 1.0 compliant XML. Some
3260 documentation is already available.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003261
Fred Drake64bb3802000-09-26 16:21:35 +00003262- pyexpat: Renamed to xml.parsers.expat since this is part of the new,
3263 packagized XML support.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003264
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003265
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003266C API
3267
3268- Add three new convenience functions for module initialization --
3269 PyModule_AddObject(), PyModule_AddIntConstant(), and
3270 PyModule_AddStringConstant().
3271
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003272- Cleaned up definition of NULL in C source code; all definitions were
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003273 removed and add #error to Python.h if NULL isn't defined after
3274 #include of stdio.h.
3275
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003276- Py_PROTO() macros that were removed in 2.0b1 have been restored for
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003277 backwards compatibility (at the source level) with old extensions.
3278
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003279- A wrapper API was added for signal() and sigaction(). Instead of
3280 either function, always use PyOS_getsig() to get a signal handler
3281 and PyOS_setsig() to set one. A new convenience typedef
3282 PyOS_sighandler_t is defined for the type of signal handlers.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003283
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003284- Add PyString_AsStringAndSize() function that provides access to the
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003285 internal data buffer and size of a string object -- or the default
3286 encoded version of a Unicode object.
3287
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003288- PyString_Size() and PyString_AsString() accept Unicode objects.
3289
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003290- The standard header <limits.h> is now included by Python.h (if it
Fred Drake64bb3802000-09-26 16:21:35 +00003291 exists). INT_MAX and LONG_MAX will always be defined, even if
3292 <limits.h> is not available.
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003293
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003294- PyFloat_FromString takes a second argument, pend, that was
3295 effectively useless. It is now officially useless but preserved for
3296 backwards compatibility. If the pend argument is not NULL, *pend is
3297 set to NULL.
3298
3299- PyObject_GetAttr() and PyObject_SetAttr() now accept Unicode objects
3300 for the attribute name. See note on getattr() above.
3301
3302- A few bug fixes to argument processing for Unicode.
3303 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() now accepts "es#" and "es".
3304 PyArg_Parse() special cases "s#" for Unicode objects; it returns a
3305 pointer to the default encoded string data instead of to the raw
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00003306 UTF-16.
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003307
3308- Py_BuildValue accepts B format (for bgen-generated code).
3309
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003310
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003311Internals
3312
3313- On Unix, fix code for finding Python installation directory so that
3314 it works when argv[0] is a relative path.
3315
Andrew M. Kuchlinga1099be2000-12-15 01:16:43 +00003316- Added a true unicode_internal_encode() function and fixed the
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003317 unicode_internal_decode function() to support Unicode objects directly
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003318 rather than by generating a copy of the object.
3319
Tim Peters482c0212000-09-26 06:33:09 +00003320- Several of the internal Unicode tables are much smaller now, and
3321 the source code should be much friendlier to weaker compilers.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003322
Jeremy Hylton97693b02000-09-26 17:42:51 +00003323- In the garbage collector: Fixed bug in collection of tuples. Fixed
3324 bug that caused some instances to be removed from the container set
3325 while they were still live. Fixed parsing in gc.set_debug() for
3326 platforms where sizeof(long) > sizeof(int).
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003327
3328- Fixed refcount problem in instance deallocation that only occurred
3329 when Py_REF_DEBUG was defined and Py_TRACE_REFS was not.
3330
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003331- On Windows, getpythonregpath is now protected against null data in
3332 registry key.
3333
3334- On Unix, create .pyc/.pyo files with O_EXCL flag to avoid a race
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00003335 condition.
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003336
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003337
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003338Build and platform-specific issues
3339
3340- Better support of GNU Pth via --with-pth configure option.
3341
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003342- Python/C API now properly exposed to dynamically-loaded extension
3343 modules on Reliant UNIX.
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003344
3345- Changes for the benefit of SunOS 4.1.4 (really!). mmapmodule.c:
3346 Don't define MS_SYNC to be zero when it is undefined. Added missing
3347 prototypes in posixmodule.c.
3348
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003349- Improved support for HP-UX build. Threads should now be correctly
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003350 configured (on HP-UX 10.20 and 11.00).
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003351
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003352- Fix largefile support on older NetBSD systems and OpenBSD by adding
3353 define for TELL64.
3354
3355
3356Tools and other miscellany
3357
3358- ftpmirror: Call to main() is wrapped in if __name__ == "__main__".
3359
3360- freeze: The modulefinder now works with 2.0 opcodes.
3361
Tim Petersa3a3a032000-11-30 05:22:44 +00003362- IDLE:
Jeremy Hyltonfa2e2c12000-09-26 16:31:30 +00003363 Move hackery of sys.argv until after the Tk instance has been
3364 created, which allows the application-specific Tkinter
3365 initialization to be executed if present; also pass an explicit
3366 className parameter to the Tk() constructor.
Fred Drake64bb3802000-09-26 16:21:35 +00003367
Jeremy Hylton1b618592000-09-26 05:32:36 +00003368
3369What's new in 2.0 beta 1?
3370=========================
3371
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003372Source Incompatibilities
3373------------------------
3374
3375None. Note that 1.6 introduced several incompatibilities with 1.5.2,
3376such as single-argument append(), connect() and bind(), and changes to
3377str(long) and repr(float).
3378
3379
3380Binary Incompatibilities
3381------------------------
3382
3383- Third party extensions built for Python 1.5.x or 1.6 cannot be used
3384with Python 2.0; these extensions will have to be rebuilt for Python
33852.0.
3386
3387- On Windows, attempting to import a third party extension built for
3388Python 1.5.x or 1.6 results in an immediate crash; there's not much we
3389can do about this. Check your PYTHONPATH environment variable!
3390
3391- Python bytecode files (*.pyc and *.pyo) are not compatible between
3392releases.
3393
3394
3395Overview of Changes Since 1.6
3396-----------------------------
3397
3398There are many new modules (including brand new XML support through
3399the xml package, and i18n support through the gettext module); a list
3400of all new modules is included below. Lots of bugs have been fixed.
3401
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003402The process for making major new changes to the language has changed
3403since Python 1.6. Enhancements must now be documented by a Python
3404Enhancement Proposal (PEP) before they can be accepted.
3405
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003406There are several important syntax enhancements, described in more
3407detail below:
3408
3409 - Augmented assignment, e.g. x += 1
3410
3411 - List comprehensions, e.g. [x**2 for x in range(10)]
3412
3413 - Extended import statement, e.g. import Module as Name
3414
3415 - Extended print statement, e.g. print >> file, "Hello"
3416
3417Other important changes:
3418
3419 - Optional collection of cyclical garbage
3420
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003421Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP)
3422---------------------------------
3423
3424PEP stands for Python Enhancement Proposal. A PEP is a design
3425document providing information to the Python community, or describing
3426a new feature for Python. The PEP should provide a concise technical
3427specification of the feature and a rationale for the feature.
3428
3429We intend PEPs to be the primary mechanisms for proposing new
3430features, for collecting community input on an issue, and for
3431documenting the design decisions that have gone into Python. The PEP
3432author is responsible for building consensus within the community and
3433documenting dissenting opinions.
3434
3435The PEPs are available at http://python.sourceforge.net/peps/.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003436
3437Augmented Assignment
3438--------------------
3439
3440This must have been the most-requested feature of the past years!
3441Eleven new assignment operators were added:
3442
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00003443 += -= *= /= %= **= <<= >>= &= ^= |=
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003444
3445For example,
3446
3447 A += B
3448
3449is similar to
3450
3451 A = A + B
3452
3453except that A is evaluated only once (relevant when A is something
3454like dict[index].attr).
3455
3456However, if A is a mutable object, A may be modified in place. Thus,
3457if A is a number or a string, A += B has the same effect as A = A+B
3458(except A is only evaluated once); but if a is a list, A += B has the
3459same effect as A.extend(B)!
3460
3461Classes and built-in object types can override the new operators in
3462order to implement the in-place behavior; the not-in-place behavior is
3463used automatically as a fallback when an object doesn't implement the
3464in-place behavior. For classes, the method name is derived from the
3465method name for the corresponding not-in-place operator by inserting
3466an 'i' in front of the name, e.g. __iadd__ implements in-place
3467__add__.
3468
3469Augmented assignment was implemented by Thomas Wouters.
3470
3471
3472List Comprehensions
3473-------------------
3474
3475This is a flexible new notation for lists whose elements are computed
3476from another list (or lists). The simplest form is:
3477
3478 [<expression> for <variable> in <sequence>]
3479
Guido van Rossum56db0952000-09-06 23:34:25 +00003480For example, [i**2 for i in range(4)] yields the list [0, 1, 4, 9].
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003481This is more efficient than a for loop with a list.append() call.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003482
3483You can also add a condition:
3484
3485 [<expression> for <variable> in <sequence> if <condition>]
3486
3487For example, [w for w in words if w == w.lower()] would yield the list
3488of words that contain no uppercase characters. This is more efficient
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003489than a for loop with an if statement and a list.append() call.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003490
3491You can also have nested for loops and more than one 'if' clause. For
3492example, here's a function that flattens a sequence of sequences::
3493
3494 def flatten(seq):
3495 return [x for subseq in seq for x in subseq]
3496
3497 flatten([[0], [1,2,3], [4,5], [6,7,8,9], []])
3498
3499This prints
3500
3501 [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]
3502
3503List comprehensions originated as a patch set from Greg Ewing; Skip
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003504Montanaro and Thomas Wouters also contributed. Described by PEP 202.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003505
3506
3507Extended Import Statement
3508-------------------------
3509
3510Many people have asked for a way to import a module under a different
3511name. This can be accomplished like this:
3512
3513 import foo
3514 bar = foo
3515 del foo
3516
3517but this common idiom gets old quickly. A simple extension of the
3518import statement now allows this to be written as follows:
3519
3520 import foo as bar
3521
3522There's also a variant for 'from ... import':
3523
3524 from foo import bar as spam
3525
3526This also works with packages; e.g. you can write this:
3527
3528 import test.regrtest as regrtest
3529
3530Note that 'as' is not a new keyword -- it is recognized only in this
3531context (this is only possible because the syntax for the import
3532statement doesn't involve expressions).
3533
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003534Implemented by Thomas Wouters. Described by PEP 221.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003535
3536
3537Extended Print Statement
3538------------------------
3539
3540Easily the most controversial new feature, this extension to the print
3541statement adds an option to make the output go to a different file
3542than the default sys.stdout.
3543
3544For example, to write an error message to sys.stderr, you can now
3545write:
3546
3547 print >> sys.stderr, "Error: bad dog!"
3548
3549As a special feature, if the expression used to indicate the file
Fred Drake45888ff2000-09-29 17:09:11 +00003550evaluates to None, the current value of sys.stdout is used. Thus:
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003551
3552 print >> None, "Hello world"
3553
3554is equivalent to
3555
3556 print "Hello world"
3557
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003558Design and implementation by Barry Warsaw. Described by PEP 214.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003559
3560
3561Optional Collection of Cyclical Garbage
3562---------------------------------------
3563
3564Python is now equipped with a garbage collector that can hunt down
3565cyclical references between Python objects. It's no replacement for
3566reference counting; in fact, it depends on the reference counts being
3567correct, and decides that a set of objects belong to a cycle if all
3568their reference counts can be accounted for from their references to
3569each other. This devious scheme was first proposed by Eric Tiedemann,
3570and brought to implementation by Neil Schemenauer.
3571
3572There's a module "gc" that lets you control some parameters of the
3573garbage collection. There's also an option to the configure script
3574that lets you enable or disable the garbage collection. In 2.0b1,
3575it's on by default, so that we (hopefully) can collect decent user
3576experience with this new feature. There are some questions about its
Fred Drake9f11cf82000-09-29 17:54:40 +00003577performance. If it proves to be too much of a problem, we'll turn it
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003578off by default in the final 2.0 release.
3579
3580
3581Smaller Changes
3582---------------
3583
3584A new function zip() was added. zip(seq1, seq2, ...) is equivalent to
3585map(None, seq1, seq2, ...) when the sequences have the same length;
3586i.e. zip([1,2,3], [10,20,30]) returns [(1,10), (2,20), (3,30)]. When
3587the lists are not all the same length, the shortest list wins:
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003588zip([1,2,3], [10,20]) returns [(1,10), (2,20)]. See PEP 201.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003589
3590sys.version_info is a tuple (major, minor, micro, level, serial).
3591
3592Dictionaries have an odd new method, setdefault(key, default).
3593dict.setdefault(key, default) returns dict[key] if it exists; if not,
3594it sets dict[key] to default and returns that value. Thus:
3595
3596 dict.setdefault(key, []).append(item)
3597
3598does the same work as this common idiom:
3599
3600 if not dict.has_key(key):
3601 dict[key] = []
3602 dict[key].append(item)
3603
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003604There are two new variants of SyntaxError that are raised for
3605indentation-related errors: IndentationError and TabError.
3606
3607Changed \x to consume exactly two hex digits; see PEP 223. Added \U
3608escape that consumes exactly eight hex digits.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003609
3610The limits on the size of expressions and file in Python source code
3611have been raised from 2**16 to 2**32. Previous versions of Python
3612were limited because the maximum argument size the Python VM accepted
3613was 2**16. This limited the size of object constructor expressions,
3614e.g. [1,2,3] or {'a':1, 'b':2}, and the size of source files. This
3615limit was raised thanks to a patch by Charles Waldman that effectively
3616fixes the problem. It is now much more likely that you will be
3617limited by available memory than by an arbitrary limit in Python.
3618
3619The interpreter's maximum recursion depth can be modified by Python
3620programs using sys.getrecursionlimit and sys.setrecursionlimit. This
3621limit is the maximum number of recursive calls that can be made by
3622Python code. The limit exists to prevent infinite recursion from
3623overflowing the C stack and causing a core dump. The default value is
36241000. The maximum safe value for a particular platform can be found
3625by running Misc/find_recursionlimit.py.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003626
3627New Modules and Packages
3628------------------------
3629
3630atexit - for registering functions to be called when Python exits.
3631
3632imputil - Greg Stein's alternative API for writing custom import
3633hooks.
3634
3635pyexpat - an interface to the Expat XML parser, contributed by Paul
3636Prescod.
3637
3638xml - a new package with XML support code organized (so far) in three
3639subpackages: xml.dom, xml.sax, and xml.parsers. Describing these
3640would fill a volume. There's a special feature whereby a
3641user-installed package named _xmlplus overrides the standard
3642xmlpackage; this is intended to give the XML SIG a hook to distribute
3643backwards-compatible updates to the standard xml package.
3644
3645webbrowser - a platform-independent API to launch a web browser.
3646
3647
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00003648Changed Modules
3649---------------
3650
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003651array -- new methods for array objects: count, extend, index, pop, and
3652remove
3653
3654binascii -- new functions b2a_hex and a2b_hex that convert between
3655binary data and its hex representation
3656
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003657calendar -- Many new functions that support features including control
3658over which day of the week is the first day, returning strings instead
3659of printing them. Also new symbolic constants for days of week,
3660e.g. MONDAY, ..., SUNDAY.
3661
3662cgi -- FieldStorage objects have a getvalue method that works like a
3663dictionary's get method and returns the value attribute of the object.
3664
3665ConfigParser -- The parser object has new methods has_option,
3666remove_section, remove_option, set, and write. They allow the module
3667to be used for writing config files as well as reading them.
3668
3669ftplib -- ntransfercmd(), transfercmd(), and retrbinary() all now
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00003670optionally support the RFC 959 REST command.
3671
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003672gzip -- readline and readlines now accept optional size arguments
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00003673
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003674httplib -- New interfaces and support for HTTP/1.1 by Greg Stein. See
3675the module doc strings for details.
Guido van Rossum830ca2a2000-09-05 15:34:16 +00003676
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003677locale -- implement getdefaultlocale for Win32 and Macintosh
3678
3679marshal -- no longer dumps core when marshaling deeply nested or
3680recursive data structures
3681
3682os -- new functions isatty, seteuid, setegid, setreuid, setregid
3683
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003684os/popen2 -- popen2/popen3/popen4 support under Windows. popen2/popen3
3685support under Unix.
3686
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003687os/pty -- support for openpty and forkpty
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003688
3689os.path -- fix semantics of os.path.commonprefix
3690
3691smtplib -- support for sending very long messages
3692
3693socket -- new function getfqdn()
3694
3695readline -- new functions to read, write and truncate history files.
3696The readline section of the library reference manual contains an
3697example.
3698
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003699select -- add interface to poll system call
3700
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003701shutil -- new copyfileobj function
3702
3703SimpleHTTPServer, CGIHTTPServer -- Fix problems with buffering in the
3704HTTP server.
3705
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003706Tkinter -- optimization of function flatten
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003707
3708urllib -- scans environment variables for proxy configuration,
Tim Peters8b092332000-09-05 20:15:25 +00003709e.g. http_proxy.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003710
3711whichdb -- recognizes dumbdbm format
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00003712
3713
3714Obsolete Modules
3715----------------
3716
3717None. However note that 1.6 made a whole slew of modules obsolete:
3718stdwin, soundex, cml, cmpcache, dircache, dump, find, grep, packmail,
3719poly, zmod, strop, util, whatsound.
3720
3721
3722Changed, New, Obsolete Tools
3723----------------------------
3724
Tim Peters8b092332000-09-05 20:15:25 +00003725None.
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00003726
3727
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003728C-level Changes
3729---------------
3730
3731Several cleanup jobs were carried out throughout the source code.
3732
3733All C code was converted to ANSI C; we got rid of all uses of the
3734Py_PROTO() macro, which makes the header files a lot more readable.
3735
3736Most of the portability hacks were moved to a new header file,
3737pyport.h; several other new header files were added and some old
3738header files were removed, in an attempt to create a more rational set
3739of header files. (Few of these ever need to be included explicitly;
3740they are all included by Python.h.)
3741
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003742Trent Mick ensured portability to 64-bit platforms, under both Linux
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003743and Win64, especially for the new Intel Itanium processor. Mick also
3744added large file support for Linux64 and Win64.
Guido van Rossumf2ffce02000-09-05 04:38:34 +00003745
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003746The C APIs to return an object's size have been update to consistently
3747use the form PyXXX_Size, e.g. PySequence_Size and PyDict_Size. In
3748previous versions, the abstract interfaces used PyXXX_Length and the
3749concrete interfaces used PyXXX_Size. The old names,
3750e.g. PyObject_Length, are still available for backwards compatibility
3751at the API level, but are deprecated.
3752
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003753The PyOS_CheckStack function has been implemented on Windows by
3754Fredrik Lundh. It prevents Python from failing with a stack overflow
3755on Windows.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003756
3757The GC changes resulted in creation of two new slots on object,
3758tp_traverse and tp_clear. The augmented assignment changes result in
Guido van Rossum4338a282000-09-06 13:02:08 +00003759the creation of a new slot for each in-place operator.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003760
3761The GC API creates new requirements for container types implemented in
Guido van Rossum4338a282000-09-06 13:02:08 +00003762C extension modules. See Include/objimpl.h for details.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003763
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003764PyErr_Format has been updated to automatically calculate the size of
3765the buffer needed to hold the formatted result string. This change
3766prevents crashes caused by programmer error.
Jeremy Hyltonbdebd542000-09-05 18:28:54 +00003767
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003768New C API calls: PyObject_AsFileDescriptor, PyErr_WriteUnraisable.
Guido van Rossume905e952000-09-05 12:42:46 +00003769
Jeremy Hylton24c3d602000-09-05 19:36:26 +00003770PyRun_AnyFileEx, PyRun_SimpleFileEx, PyRun_FileEx -- New functions
3771that are the same as their non-Ex counterparts except they take an
3772extra flag argument that tells them to close the file when done.
3773
3774XXX There were other API changes that should be fleshed out here.
Guido van Rossumab9d6f01998-08-10 22:01:13 +00003775
Tim Peters8b092332000-09-05 20:15:25 +00003776
3777Windows Changes
3778---------------
3779
3780New popen2/popen3/peopen4 in os module (see Changed Modules above).
3781
3782os.popen is much more usable on Windows 95 and 98. See Microsoft
3783Knowledge Base article Q150956. The Win9x workaround described there
3784is implemented by the new w9xpopen.exe helper in the root of your
3785Python installation. Note that Python uses this internally; it is not
3786a standalone program.
3787
3788Administrator privileges are no longer required to install Python
3789on Windows NT or Windows 2000. If you have administrator privileges,
3790Python's registry info will be written under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.
3791Otherwise the installer backs off to writing Python's registry info
Guido van Rossum4338a282000-09-06 13:02:08 +00003792under HKEY_CURRENT_USER. The latter is sufficient for all "normal"
Tim Peters8b092332000-09-05 20:15:25 +00003793uses of Python, but will prevent some advanced uses from working
3794(for example, running a Python script as an NT service, or possibly
3795from CGI).
3796
3797[This was new in 1.6] The installer no longer runs a separate Tcl/Tk
3798installer; instead, it installs the needed Tcl/Tk files directly in the
3799Python directory. If you already have a Tcl/Tk installation, this
3800wastes some disk space (about 4 Megs) but avoids problems with
3801conflicting Tcl/Tk installations, and makes it much easier for Python
3802to ensure that Tcl/Tk can find all its files.
3803
3804[This was new in 1.6] The Windows installer now installs by default in
3805\Python20\ on the default volume, instead of \Program Files\Python-2.0\.
3806
Guido van Rossumf62ed9c2000-09-26 11:16:10 +00003807
3808Updates to the changes between 1.5.2 and 1.6
3809--------------------------------------------
3810
3811The 1.6 NEWS file can't be changed after the release is done, so here
3812is some late-breaking news:
3813
3814New APIs in locale.py: normalize(), getdefaultlocale(), resetlocale(),
3815and changes to getlocale() and setlocale().
3816
3817The new module is now enabled per default.
3818
3819It is not true that the encodings codecs cannot be used for normal
3820strings: the string.encode() (which is also present on 8-bit strings
3821!) allows using them for 8-bit strings too, e.g. to convert files from
3822cp1252 (Windows) to latin-1 or vice-versa.
3823
3824Japanese codecs are available from Tamito KAJIYAMA:
3825http://pseudo.grad.sccs.chukyo-u.ac.jp/~kajiyama/python/
3826
3827
Guido van Rossumab9d6f01998-08-10 22:01:13 +00003828======================================================================