blob: 1970900da70f8d7f1f006ea69a7a882a302b023a [file] [log] [blame]
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
7What's New in Python 2.4 (release candidate 1|beta 3)
8=====================================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
15...
16
17Extension Modules
18-----------------
19
20...
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +000021
22Library
23-------
24
25- Bug 1052242: If exceptions are raised by an atexit handler function an
26 attempt is made to execute the remaining handlers. The last exception
27 raised is re-raised.
28
Tim Peters90cf2122004-11-06 23:45:48 +000029- Patch 1061679: Added `__all__` to pickletools.py.
30
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000031Build
32-----
Skip Montanaro599bd5e2004-11-04 04:31:30 +000033
Anthony Baxterb0c66302004-11-04 05:23:17 +000034...
35
36C API
37-----
38
39...
40
41Documentation
42-------------
43
44...
45
46Tests
47-----
48
49...
50
51Windows
52-------
53
54...
55
56Mac
57---
58
59...
60
61New platforms
62-------------
63
64...
65
66Tools/Demos
67-----------
68
69...
70
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +000071
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000072What's New in Python 2.4 beta 2?
73================================
74
Anthony Baxter9f41f3a2004-11-03 06:21:37 +000075*Release date: 03-NOV-2004*
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000076
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +000077License
78-------
79
80The Python Software Foundation changed the license under which Python
81is released, to remove Python version numbers. There were no other
82changes to the license. So, for example, wherever the license for
83Python 2.3 said "Python 2.3", the new license says "Python". The
84intent is to make it possible to refer to the PSF license in a more
85durable way. For example, some people say they're confused by that
86the Open Source Initiative's entry for the Python Software Foundation
87License::
88
89 http://www.opensource.org/licenses/PythonSoftFoundation.php
90
91says "Python 2.1.1" all over it, wondering whether it applies only
92to Python 2.1.1.
93
94The official name of the new license is the Python Software Foundation
95License Version 2.
96
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +000097Core and builtins
98-----------------
99
Tim Petersead8b7a2004-10-30 23:09:22 +0000100- Bug #1055820 Cyclic garbage collection was not protecting against that
101 calling a live weakref to a piece of cyclic trash could resurrect an
102 insane mutation of the trash if any Python code ran during gc (via
103 running a dead object's __del__ method, running another callback on a
104 weakref to a dead object, or via any Python code run in any other thread
105 that managed to obtain the GIL while a __del__ or callback was running
106 in the thread doing gc). The most likely symptom was "impossible"
107 ``AttributeEror`` exceptions, appearing seemingly at random, on weakly
108 referenced objects. The cure was to clear all weakrefs to unreachable
109 objects before allowing any callbacks to run.
110
Raymond Hettinger561fbf12004-10-26 01:52:37 +0000111- Bug #1054139 _PyString_Resize() now invalidates its cached hash value.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000112
113Extension Modules
114-----------------
115
Raymond Hettinger9047c8f2004-10-24 00:10:06 +0000116- Bug #1048870: the compiler now generates distinct code objects for
117 functions with identical bodies. This was producing confusing
118 traceback messages which pointed to the function where the code
119 object was first defined rather than the function being executed.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000120
121Library
122-------
123
Barry Warsaw8c72eae2004-11-01 03:52:43 +0000124- Patch #1056967 changes the semantics of Template.safe_substitute() so that
125 no ValueError is raised on an 'invalid' match group. Now the delimiter is
126 returned.
127
Raymond Hettinger2ef7e6c2004-10-24 00:32:24 +0000128- Bug #1052503 pdb.runcall() was not passing along keyword arguments.
129
Raymond Hettingerc64aab82004-10-20 08:21:57 +0000130- Bug #902037: XML.sax.saxutils.prepare_input_source() now combines relative
131 paths with a base path before checking os.path.isfile().
132
Raymond Hettingere54e7262004-10-20 07:17:16 +0000133- The whichdb module can now be run from the command line.
134
Brett Cannon8abcc5d2004-10-18 01:37:57 +0000135- Bug #1045381: time.strptime() can now infer the date using %U or %W (week of
136 the year) when the day of the week and year are also specified.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000137
Andrew M. Kuchling0d19bae2004-10-19 19:54:41 +0000138- Bug #1048816: fix bug in Ctrl-K at start of line in curses.textpad.Textbox
139
Andrew M. Kuchling66e80ba2004-10-20 11:56:15 +0000140- Bug #1017553: fix bug in tarfile.filemode()
141
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000142- Patch #737473: fix bug that old source code is shown in tracebacks even if
Hye-Shik Chang182ac852004-10-26 09:16:42 +0000143 the source code is updated and reloaded.
144
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000145Build
146-----
147
Hye-Shik Chang33761492004-10-26 09:53:46 +0000148- Patch #1044395: --enable-shared is allowed in FreeBSD also.
Brett Cannonbe8370dc2004-10-18 01:32:09 +0000149
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000150What's New in Python 2.4 beta 1?
151================================
152
Anthony Baxter6a587c12004-10-15 08:07:21 +0000153*Release date: 15-OCT-2004*
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000154
155Core and builtins
156-----------------
157
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000158- Patch #975056: Restartable signals were not correctly disabled on
Anthony Baxtere4f8a482004-10-13 14:55:56 +0000159 BSD systems. Consistently use PyOS_setsig() instead of signal().
160
Tim Peters263091e2004-10-10 01:58:44 +0000161- The internal portable implementation of thread-local storage (TLS), used
162 by the ``PyGILState_Ensure()``/``PyGILState_Release()`` API, was not
163 thread-correct. This could lead to a variety of problems, up to and
164 including segfaults. See bug 1041645 for an example.
165
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000166- Added a command line option, -m module, which searches sys.path for the
167 module and then runs it. (Contributed by Nick Coghlan.)
168
Raymond Hettinger2c31a052004-09-22 18:44:21 +0000169- The bytecode optimizer now folds tuples of constants into a single
170 constant.
171
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000172- SF bug #513866: Float/long comparison anomaly. Prior to 2.4b1, when
173 an integer was compared to a float, the integer was coerced to a float.
174 That could yield spurious overflow errors (if the integer was very
175 large), and to anomalies such as
176 ``long(1e200)+1 == 1e200 == long(1e200)-1``. Coercion to float is no
177 longer performed, and cases like ``long(1e200)-1 < 1e200``,
178 ``long(1e200)+1 > 1e200`` and ``(1 << 20000) > 1e200`` are computed
179 correctly now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000180
181Extension modules
182-----------------
183
Tim Peterscf8997f2004-10-01 02:13:16 +0000184- ``collections.deque`` objects didn't play quite right with garbage
185 collection, which could lead to a segfault in a release build, or
Raymond Hettingerdb29e0f2004-10-07 06:46:25 +0000186 an assert failure in a debug build. Also, added overflow checks,
187 better detection of mutation during iteration, and shielded deque
188 comparisons from unusual subclass overrides of the __iter__() method.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000189
190Library
191-------
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000192
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000193- Patch 1046644: distutils build_ext grew two new options - --swig for
Tim Petersacaffe62004-10-23 03:43:54 +0000194 specifying the swig executable to use, and --swig-opts to specify
Anthony Baxtera0240342004-10-14 10:02:08 +0000195 options to pass to swig. --swig-opts="-c++" is the new way to spell
196 --swig-cpp.
197
Anthony Baxter22dcf662004-10-13 15:54:17 +0000198- Patch 983206: distutils now obeys environment variable LDSHARED, if
199 it is set.
200
Andrew M. Kuchling518d3932004-10-12 15:32:10 +0000201- Added Peter Astrand's subprocess.py module. See PEP 324 for details.
Fredrik Lundh5b3687d2004-10-12 15:26:28 +0000202
Brett Cannon4f35c712004-10-06 02:11:37 +0000203- time.strptime() now properly escapes timezones and all other locale-specific
204 strings for regex-specific symbols. Was breaking under Japanese Windows when
205 the timezone was specified as "Tokyo (standard time)".
206 Closes bug #1039270.
207
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000208- Updates for the email package:
Brett Cannon06a30b02004-10-22 06:22:54 +0000209
Barry Warsaw418de1f2004-10-11 14:32:47 +0000210 + email.Utils.formatdate() grew a 'usegmt' argument for HTTP support.
Barry Warsawbb113862004-10-03 03:16:19 +0000211 + All deprecated APIs that in email 2.x issued warnings have been removed:
212 _encoder argument to the MIMEText constructor, Message.add_payload(),
213 Utils.dump_address_pair(), Utils.decode(), Utils.encode()
214 + New deprecations: Generator.__call__(), Message.get_type(),
215 Message.get_main_type(), Message.get_subtype(), the 'strict' argument to
216 the Parser constructor. These will be removed in email 3.1.
217 + Support for Python earlier than 2.3 has been removed (see PEP 291).
218 + All defect classes have been renamed to end in 'Defect'.
219 + Some FeedParser fixes; also a MultipartInvariantViolationDefect will be
220 added to messages that claim to be multipart but really aren't.
221 + Updates to documentation.
222
Raymond Hettinger596ba4d2004-09-24 03:41:05 +0000223- re's findall() and finditer() functions now take an optional flags argument
224 just like the compile(), search(), and match() functions. Also, documented
225 the previously existing start and stop parameters for the findall() and
226 finditer() methods of regular expression objects.
227
Raymond Hettinger0318a932004-09-22 18:03:47 +0000228- rfc822 Messages now support iterating over the headers.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000229
Martin v. Löwisf3c56112004-09-18 09:08:52 +0000230- The (undocumented) tarfile.Tarfile.membernames has been removed;
231 applications should use the getmember function.
232
Martin v. Löwis39a31782004-09-18 09:03:49 +0000233- httplib now offers symbolic constants for the HTTP status codes.
234
Tim Peters528ca532004-09-16 01:30:50 +0000235- SF bug #1028306: Trying to compare a ``datetime.date`` to a
236 ``datetime.datetime`` mistakenly compared only the year, month and day.
237 Now it acts like a mixed-type comparison: ``False`` for ``==``,
238 ``True`` for ``!=``, and raises ``TypeError`` for other comparison
239 operators. Because datetime is a subclass of date, comparing only the
240 base class (date) members can still be done, if that's desired, by
241 forcing using of the approprate date method; e.g.,
242 ``a_date.__eq__(a_datetime)`` is true if and only if the year, month
243 and day members of ``a_date`` and ``a_datetime`` are equal.
244
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000245- bdist_rpm now supports command line options --force-arch,
246 {pre,post}-install, {pre,post}-uninstall, and
Martin v. Löwis23c48a12004-09-10 06:32:54 +0000247 {prep,build,install,clean,verify}-script.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000248
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000249- SF patch #998993: The UTF-8 and the UTF-16 stateful decoders now support
250 decoding incomplete input (when the input stream is temporarily exhausted).
251 ``codecs.StreamReader`` now implements buffering, which enables proper
252 readline support for the UTF-16 decoders. ``codecs.StreamReader.read()``
253 has a new argument ``chars`` which specifies the number of characters to
254 return. ``codecs.StreamReader.readline()`` and
255 ``codecs.StreamReader.readlines()`` have a new argument ``keepends``.
256 Trailing "\n"s will be stripped from the lines if ``keepends`` is false.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000257
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000258- The documentation for doctest is greatly expanded, and now covers all
259 the new public features (of which there are many).
260
Walter Dörwald5011d0c2004-09-13 08:53:15 +0000261- ``doctest.master`` was put back in, and ``doctest.testmod()`` once again
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000262 updates it. This isn't good, because every ``testmod()`` call
263 contributes to bloating the "hidden" state of ``doctest.master``, but
264 some old code apparently relies on it. For now, all we can do is
265 encourage people to stitch doctests together via doctest's unittest
Tim Petersa80a2c82004-09-26 05:13:18 +0000266 integration features instead.
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000267
Skip Montanaro82d0eec2004-09-14 17:58:31 +0000268- httplib now handles ipv6 address/port pairs.
269
David Goodger68a1abd2004-10-03 15:40:25 +0000270- SF bug #1017864: ConfigParser now correctly handles default keys,
271 processing them with ``ConfigParser.optionxform`` when supplied,
272 consistent with the handling of config file entries and runtime-set
273 options.
274
David Goodger1cbf2062004-10-03 15:55:09 +0000275- SF bug #997050: Document, test, & check for non-string values in
276 ConfigParser. Moved the new string-only restriction added in
277 rev. 1.65 to the SafeConfigParser class, leaving existing
278 ConfigParser & RawConfigParser behavior alone, and documented the
279 conditions under which non-string values work.
280
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000281Build
282-----
283
Brett Cannonbfef8692004-09-28 04:08:11 +0000284- Building on darwin now includes /opt/local/include and /opt/local/lib for
285 building extension modules. This is so as to include software installed as
286 a DarwinPorts port <http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/>
287
Tim Peters862f0592004-09-23 19:11:32 +0000288- pyport.h now defines a Py_IS_NAN macro. It works as-is when the
289 platform C computes true for ``x != x`` if and only if X is a NaN.
290 Other platforms can override the default definition with a platform-
291 specific spelling in that platform's pyconfig.h. You can also override
292 pyport.h's default Py_IS_INFINITY definition now.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000293
294C API
295-----
296
Tim Peters7f468f22004-10-11 02:40:51 +0000297- SF patch 1044089: New function ``PyEval_ThreadsInitialized()`` returns
298 non-zero if PyEval_InitThreads() has been called.
299
300- The undocumented and unused extern int ``_PyThread_Started`` was removed.
301
Tim Peters84705582004-10-10 02:47:33 +0000302- The C API calls ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
303 are two of the very few advertised as being safe to call without holding
304 the GIL. However, this wasn't true in a debug build, as bug 1041645
305 demonstrated. In a debug build, Python redirects the ``PyMem`` family
306 of calls to Python's small-object allocator, to get the benefit of
307 its extra debugging capabilities. But Python's small-object allocator
308 isn't threadsafe, relying on the GIL to avoid the expense of doing its
309 own locking. ``PyInterpreterState_New()`` and ``PyThreadState_New()``
310 call the platform ``malloc()`` directly now, regardless of build type.
311
Tim Peters307fa782004-09-23 08:06:40 +0000312- PyLong_AsUnsignedLong[Mask] now support int objects as well.
313
Walter Dörwald69652032004-09-07 20:24:22 +0000314- SF patch #998993: ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF8Stateful`` and
315 ``PyUnicode_DecodeUTF16Stateful`` have been added, which implement stateful
316 decoding.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000317
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000318Tests
319-----
320
321- test__locale ported to unittest
322
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000323Mac
324---
325
Just van Rossumdd3c8372004-10-03 16:27:09 +0000326- ``plistlib`` now supports non-dict root objects. There is also a new
327 interface for reading and writing plist files: ``readPlist(pathOrFile)``
328 and ``writePlist(rootObject, pathOrFile)``
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000329
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000330Tools/Demos
331-----------
332
Tim Peters130e37f2004-10-03 19:03:19 +0000333- The text file comparison scripts ``ndiff.py`` and ``diff.py`` now
334 read the input files in universal-newline mode. This spares them
335 from consuming a great deal of time to deduce the useless result that,
336 e.g., a file with Windows line ends and a file with Linux line ends
337 have no lines in common.
Brett Cannon2ad68e62004-09-06 23:30:27 +0000338
339
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000340What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 3?
341=================================
342
Anthony Baxtere13943a2004-09-02 16:37:15 +0000343*Release date: 02-SEP-2004*
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000344
345Core and builtins
346-----------------
347
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000348- SF patch #1007189: ``from ... import ...`` statements now allow the name
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +0000349 list to be surrounded by parentheses.
350
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000351- Some speedups for long arithmetic, thanks to Trevor Perrin. Gradeschool
352 multiplication was sped a little by optimizing the C code. Gradeschool
353 squaring was sped by about a factor of 2, by exploiting that about half
354 the digit products are duplicates in a square. Because exponentiation
355 uses squaring often, this also speeds long power. For example, the time
356 to compute 17**1000000 dropped from about 14 seconds to 9 on my box due
357 to this much. The cutoff for Karatsuba multiplication was raised,
358 since gradeschool multiplication got quicker, and the cutoff was
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000359 aggressively small regardless. The exponentiation algorithm was switched
360 from right-to-left to left-to-right, which is more efficient for small
361 bases. In addition, if the exponent is large, the algorithm now does
362 5 bits (instead of 1 bit) at a time. That cut the time to compute
363 17**1000000 on my box in half again, down to about 4.5 seconds.
Tim Peters0973b992004-08-29 22:16:50 +0000364
Tim Petersc8854432004-08-25 02:14:08 +0000365- OverflowWarning is no longer generated. PEP 237 scheduled this to
366 occur in Python 2.3, but since OverflowWarning was disabled by default,
367 nobody realized it was still being generated. On the chance that user
368 code is still using them, the Python builtin OverflowWarning, and
369 corresponding C API PyExc_OverflowWarning, will exist until Python 2.5.
370
Martin v. Löwis336e85f2004-08-19 11:31:58 +0000371- Py_InitializeEx has been added.
372
Brett Cannonadd33602004-08-15 07:21:25 +0000373- Fix the order of application of decorators. The proper order is bottom-up;
374 the first decorator listed is the last one called.
375
Neal Norwitzf0769532004-08-13 03:18:29 +0000376- SF patch #1005778. Fix a seg fault if the list size changed while
377 calling list.index(). This could happen if a rich comparison function
378 modified the list.
379
Michael W. Hudson5e897952004-08-12 18:12:44 +0000380- The ``func_name`` (a.k.a. ``__name__``) attribute of user-defined
381 functions is now writable.
382
Michael W. Hudson5523c252004-08-12 18:09:00 +0000383- code_new (a.k.a new.code()) now checks its arguments sufficiently
384 carefully that passing them on to PyCode_New() won't trigger calls
385 to Py_FatalError() or PyErr_BadInternalCall(). It is still the case
386 that the returned code object might be entirely insane.
387
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000388- Subclasses of string can no longer be interned. The semantics of
389 interning were not clear here -- a subclass could be mutable, for
390 example -- and had bugs. Explicitly interning a subclass of string
391 via intern() will raise a TypeError. Internal operations that attempt
392 to intern a string subclass will have no effect.
Jeremy Hylton4c989dd2004-08-07 19:20:05 +0000393
Tim Peters83b57352004-08-08 07:24:22 +0000394- Bug 1003935: xrange() could report bogus OverflowErrors. Documented
395 what xrange() intends, and repaired tests accordingly.
396
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000397Extension modules
398-----------------
399
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000400- difflib now supports HTML side-by-side diff.
401
Martin v. Löwisdc3883f2004-08-29 15:46:35 +0000402- os.urandom has been added for systems that support sources of random
403 data.
404
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000405- Patch 1012740: truncate() on a writeable cStringIO now resets the
406 position to the end of the stream. This is consistent with the original
407 StringIO module and avoids inadvertently resurrecting data that was
408 supposed to have been truncated away.
409
Dave Cole331708b2004-08-09 04:51:41 +0000410- Added socket.socketpair().
411
Dave Cole3203efb2004-08-26 00:37:31 +0000412- Added CurrentByteIndex, CurrentColumnNumber, CurrentLineNumber
413 members to xml.parsers.expat.XMLParser object.
414
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000415- The mpz, rotor, and xreadlines modules, all deprecated in earlier
Andrew M. Kuchling00873432004-08-31 13:50:43 +0000416 versions of Python, have now been removed.
417
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000418Library
419-------
420
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000421- Patch #934356: if a module defines __all__, believe that rather than using
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000422 heuristics for filtering out imported names.
Johannes Gijsbers4c11f602004-08-30 14:13:04 +0000423
Johannes Gijsbersae882f72004-08-30 10:19:56 +0000424- Patch #941486: added os.path.lexists(), which returns True for broken
425 symlinks, unlike os.path.exists().
426
Raymond Hettinger356a4592004-08-30 06:14:31 +0000427- the random module now uses os.urandom() for seeding if it is available.
428 Added a new generator based on os.urandom().
429
Martin v. Löwise064b412004-08-29 16:34:40 +0000430- difflib and diff.py can now generate HTML.
431
Martin v. Löwiscae9e672004-08-25 13:04:53 +0000432- bdist_rpm now includes version and release in the BuildRoot, and
433 replaces - by ``_`` in version and release.
Martin v. Löwiscf525242004-08-25 13:00:34 +0000434
Martin v. Löwis9f5c0c42004-08-25 11:37:43 +0000435- distutils build/build_scripts now has an -e option to specify the
436 path to the Python interpreter for installed scripts.
437
Barry Warsaw8bee7612004-08-25 02:22:30 +0000438- PEP 292 classes Template and SafeTemplate are added to the string module.
439
Martin v. Löwis75b9da42004-08-18 13:57:44 +0000440- tarfile now generates GNU tar files by default.
441
Martin v. Löwisdeacce22004-08-18 12:46:26 +0000442- HTTPResponse has now a getheaders method.
443
Johannes Gijsbersc473c992004-08-18 12:40:31 +0000444- Patch #1006219: let inspect.getsource handle '@' decorators. Thanks Simon
445 Percivall.
446
Martin v. Löwis318a12e2004-08-18 12:27:40 +0000447- logging.handlers.SMTPHandler.date_time has been removed;
448 the class now uses email.Utils.formatdate to generate the time stamp.
449
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000450- A new function tkFont.nametofont was added to return an existing
451 font. The Font class constructor now has an additional exists argument
452 which, if True, requests to return/configure an existing font, rather
Tim Peters037b3ee2004-08-21 06:55:43 +0000453 than creating a new one.
Martin v. Löwisfe84d172004-08-18 11:06:45 +0000454
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000455- Updated the decimal package's min() and max() methods to match the
456 latest revision of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification.
457 Quiet NaNs are ignored and equal values are sorted based on sign
458 and exponent.
459
460- The decimal package's Context.copy() method now returns deep copies.
461
462- Deprecated sys.exitfunc in favor of the atexit module. The sys.exitfunc
463 attribute will be kept around for backwards compatability and atexit
464 will just become the one preferred way to do it.
465
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000466- patch #675551: Add get_history_item and replace_history_item functions
467 to the readline module.
468
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000469- bug #989672: pdb.doc and the help messages for the help_d and help_u methods
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000470 of the pdb.Pdb class gives have been corrected. d(own) goes to a newer
471 frame, u(p) to an older frame, not the other way around.
Johannes Gijsbers34c41202004-08-14 15:19:28 +0000472
Johannes Gijsbers4ec40642004-08-14 15:01:53 +0000473- bug #990669: os.path.realpath() will resolve symlinks before normalizing the
474 path, as normalizing the path may alter the meaning of the path if it
475 contains symlinks.
476
Johannes Gijsbers9d134b72004-08-14 14:03:03 +0000477- bug #851123: shutil.copyfile will raise an exception when trying to copy a
478 file onto a link to itself. Thanks Gregory Ball.
479
Brett Cannonb3de2e12004-08-13 18:46:24 +0000480- bug #570300: Fix inspect to resolve file locations using os.path.realpath()
481 so as to properly list all functions in a module when the module itself is
482 reached through a symlink. Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
483
Tim Peters3ddd60a2004-08-08 02:43:33 +0000484- doctest refactoring continued. See the docs for details. As part of
485 this effort, some old and little- (never?) used features are now
486 deprecated: the Tester class, the module is_private() function, and the
487 isprivate argument to testmod(). The Tester class supplied a feeble
488 "by hand" way to combine multiple doctests, if you knew exactly what
489 you were doing. The newer doctest features for unittest integration
490 already did a better job of that, are stronger now than ever, and the
491 new DocTestRunner class is a saner foundation if you want to do it by
492 hand. The "private name" filtering gimmick was a mistake from the
493 start, and testmod() changed long ago to ignore it by default. If
494 you want to filter out tests, the new DocTestFinder class can be used
495 to return a list of all doctests, and you can filter that list by
496 any computable criteria before passing it to a DocTestRunner instance.
497
Matthias Klose2e829c02004-08-15 17:04:33 +0000498- Bug #891637, patch #1005466: fix inspect.getargs() crash on def foo((bar)).
499
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000500Tools/Demos
501-----------
502
Raymond Hettinger9bb1f052004-08-18 02:51:32 +0000503- IDLE's shortcut keys for windows are now case insensitive so that
504 Control-V works the same as Control-v.
505
Matthias Klose2443d4a2004-08-16 12:10:12 +0000506- pygettext.py: Generate POT-Creation-Date header in ISO format.
507
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000508Build
509-----
510
Tim Peters47e52ee2004-08-30 02:44:38 +0000511- Backward incompatibility: longintrepr.h now triggers a compile-time
512 error if SHIFT (the number of bits in a Python long "digit") isn't
513 divisible by 5. This new requirement allows simple code for the new
514 5-bits-at-a-time long_pow() implementation. If necessary, the
515 restriction could be removed (by complicating long_pow(), or by
516 falling back to the 1-bit-at-a-time algorithm), but there are no
517 plans to do so.
518
Brett Cannoncc8a4f62004-08-26 01:44:07 +0000519- bug #991962: When building with --disable-toolbox-glue on Darwin no
520 attempt to build Mac-specific modules occurs.
521
Michael W. Hudson800ba232004-08-12 18:19:17 +0000522- The --with-tsc flag to configure to enable VM profiling with the
523 processor's timestamp counter now works on PPC platforms.
524
Skip Montanaroe5069012004-08-15 14:32:06 +0000525- patch #1006629: Define _XOPEN_SOURCE to 500 on Solaris 8/9 to match
526 GCC's definition and avoid redefinition warnings.
527
Matthias Klosea2542be2004-08-16 11:35:51 +0000528- Detect pthreads support (provided by gnu pth pthread emulation) on
529 GNU/k*BSD systems.
530
Hye-Shik Chang3ba5bfc2004-08-19 17:52:37 +0000531- bug #1005737, #1007249: Fixed several build problems and warnings
532 found on old/legacy C compilers of HP-UX, IRIX and Tru64.
533
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000534C API
535-----
536
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000537..
538
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000539Documentation
540-------------
541
Neal Norwitz5268c392004-08-21 15:13:52 +0000542- patch #1005936, bug #1009373: fix index entries which contain
543 an underscore when viewed with Acrobat.
544
545- bug #990669: os.path.normpath may alter the meaning of a path if
546 it contains symbolic links. This has been documented in a comment
547 since 1992, but is now in the library reference as well.
Johannes Gijsbersb112d6e2004-08-14 14:41:32 +0000548
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000549New platforms
550-------------
551
Hye-Shik Changf64700a2004-08-18 15:13:41 +0000552- FreeBSD 6 is now supported.
553
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000554Tests
555-----
556
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000557..
558
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000559Windows
560-------
561
Tim Peters79b52b72004-08-12 18:37:10 +0000562- Boosted the stack reservation for python.exe and pythonw.exe from
563 the default 1MB to 2MB. Stack frames under VC 7.1 for 2.4 are enough
564 bigger than under VC 6.0 for 2.3.4 that deeply recursive progams
565 within the default sys.getrecursionlimit() default value of 1000 were
566 able to suffer undetected C stack overflows. The standard test program
567 test_compiler was one such program. If a Python process on Windows
568 "just vanishes" without a trace, and without an error message of any
569 kind, but with an exit code of 128, undetected stack overflow may be
570 the problem.
571
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000572Mac
573---
574
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000575..
576
Andrew M. Kuchlingb34a6bc2004-08-07 14:03:33 +0000577
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000578What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
579=================================
580
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000581*Release date: 05-AUG-2004*
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000582
583Core and builtins
584-----------------
585
Raymond Hettinger52a21b82004-08-06 18:43:09 +0000586- Patch #980695: Implements efficient string concatenation for statements
587 of the form s=s+t and s+=t. This will vary across implementations.
588 Accordingly, the str.join() method is strongly preferred for performance
589 sensitive code.
590
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000591- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
Johannes Gijsbers343cb8a2004-08-30 14:27:11 +0000592 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so::
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000593
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000594 @staticmethod
595 def foo(bar):
Tim Peters82076ef2004-09-13 00:52:51 +0000596
Anthony Baxterff347ca2004-08-05 07:21:01 +0000597 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect the current state)
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +0000598
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000599- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
600 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
601 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
602 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
603 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
604 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
605 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
606 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
607 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
608 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
609 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
610
611 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
612 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
613 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
614 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
615 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
616 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
617 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
618
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +0000619- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
620 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
621
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000622- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000623 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +0000624
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000625- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000626 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000627 which was missing for no apparent reason.
628
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000629- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000630 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
631 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
632
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000633- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
634 types that support garbage collection.
635
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +0000636- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
637
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +0000638- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
639 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
640 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
641 Jython.
642
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000643- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
644
Hye-Shik Changb5047fd2004-08-04 06:33:51 +0000645- Added a workaround for proper string operations in BSDs. str.split
646 and str.is* methods can now work correctly with UTF-8 locales.
647
Hye-Shik Changc81c6952004-08-04 17:40:38 +0000648- Bug #989185: unicode.iswide() and unicode.width() is dropped and
649 the East Asian Width support is moved to unicodedata extension
650 module.
Hye-Shik Change9ddfbb2004-08-04 07:38:35 +0000651
Hye-Shik Chang7df44b32004-08-04 17:36:41 +0000652- Patch #941229: The source code encoding in interactive mode
653 now refers sys.stdin.encoding not just ISO-8859-1 anymore. This
654 allows for non-latin-1 users to write unicode strings directly.
655
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000656Extension modules
657-----------------
658
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +0000659- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
660
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000661Library
662-------
663
Marc-André Lemburgc759f072004-08-05 12:43:30 +0000664- Added new codecs and aliases for ISO_8859-11, ISO_8859-16 and
665 TIS-620
666
Tim Peters8485b562004-08-04 18:46:34 +0000667- Thanks to Edward Loper, doctest has been massively refactored, and
668 many new features were added. Full docs will appear later. For now
669 the doctest module comments and new test cases give good coverage.
670 The refactoring provides many hook points for customizing behavior
671 (such as how to report errors, and how to compare expected to actual
672 output). New features include a <BLANKLINE> marker for expected
673 output containing blank lines, options to produce unified or context
674 diffs when actual output doesn't match expectations, an option to
675 normalize whitespace before comparing, and an option to use an
676 ellipsis to signify "don't care" regions of output.
677
Martin v. Löwis1fa649f2004-08-03 18:45:31 +0000678- Tkinter now supports the wish -sync and -use options.
679
Fred Drakef901abd2004-08-03 17:58:55 +0000680- The following methods in time support passing of None: ctime(), gmtime(),
681 and localtime(). If None is provided, the current time is used (the
682 same as when the argument is omitted).
683 [SF bug 658254, patch 663482]
684
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +0000685- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
686
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +0000687- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
688 schemes are offered.
689
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +0000690- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
691
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +0000692- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
693 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
694 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
695
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +0000696- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
697
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +0000698- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
699 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
700
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +0000701- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
702 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
703 when dummy_threading is being used.
704
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +0000705- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
706 from a tarfile.
707
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000708- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000709 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000710
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000711- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
712 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
713 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
714 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
715
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000716- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
717 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
718
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000719- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
720 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
721 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
722 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
723 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
724 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
725 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
726 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
727 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
728 by some other method in progress).
729
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000730- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
731 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
732 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000733
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000734- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
735
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000736- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
737 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
738 AM Kuchling.
739
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000740- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
741 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
742 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
743
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000744- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
745 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
746 instead of unsigned.
747
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000748- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000749 no longer part of the public API.
750
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000751- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
752 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
753 string methods of the same name).
754
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000755- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000756 SF patch 945642.
757
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000758- doctest unittest integration improvements:
759
760 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
761
762 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
763 DocTestSuites.
764
765- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
766 that provide thread-local data.
767
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000768- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
769 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
770
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000771- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
772
773- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
774 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
775 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
776
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000777- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
778
779 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
780 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
781 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000782
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000783 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
784 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
785 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
786 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
787
788 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
789 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
790
791 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
792 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
793 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
794 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
795
796 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
797 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
798 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
799 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
800 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
801
802 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
803 wrapping help output.
804
805 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
806 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
807 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000808
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000809C API
810-----
811
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000812- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
813 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
814 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
815 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
816 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
817 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
818 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
819 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
820 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
821 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
822 its visible semantics have not changed.
823
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000824- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
825 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
826
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000827Documentation
828-------------
829
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000830- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000831
832 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
Andrew M. Kuchling78d375f2004-08-07 14:00:39 +0000833 assigning their values
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000834
Andrew M. Kuchling28025ec2004-08-07 13:59:22 +0000835 - correct my misconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000836
837 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
838
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000839- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000840
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000841Tests
842-----
843
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000844- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000845 platforms that use the Makefile.
846
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000847- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
848 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
849 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
850
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000851
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000852What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
853=================================
854
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000855*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000856
857Core and builtins
858-----------------
859
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000860- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
861 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
862 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
863 objects now (one object instead of three).
864
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000865- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
866 Windows DLLs.
867
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000868- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
869 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000870
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000871- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
872 a new .pyc magic.
873
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000874- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
875 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
876 be there.
877
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000878- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
879 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
880 the LC_NUMERIC category.
881
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000882- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
883 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
884 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
885
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000886- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
887
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000888- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
889 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
890 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000891
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000892- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
893 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
894
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000895- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
896
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000897- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000898 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000899
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000900- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
901
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000902- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
903
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000904- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
905 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
906
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000907- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
908 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
909 Fixes bug #858016 .
910
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000911- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
912 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
913 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
914
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000915- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
916 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
917 improves their performance (about 35%).
918
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000919- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
920 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
921 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
922
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000923- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
924 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
925 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
926 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
927
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000928- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
929 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
930 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
931 length is not known).
932
933- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
934 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000935 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
936 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000937 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
938
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000939- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
940 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
941
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000942- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
943 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
944 keyword arguments.
945
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000946- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
947 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
948 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
949
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000950- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
951 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
952 cases.
953
954- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
955 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
956 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
957 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
958 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
959 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
960 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
961 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
962 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
963 a release build.
964
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000965- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
966 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
967
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000968- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000969 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000970
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000971- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
972 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
973 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
974 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
975 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
976 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
977 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
978 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
979 destroyed.
980
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000981- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
982 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
983 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
984 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
985 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
986 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
987 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
988 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
989
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000990- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
991 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
992 character other than a space.
993
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000994- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
995 by the function object or by the method object, the function
996 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
997 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
998 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
999 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
1000 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
1001 attributes with the same name.
1002
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001003- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
1004 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
1005 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
1006 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
1007 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
1008 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
1009 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
1010 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
1011 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
1012 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
1013 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
1014 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
1015 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
1016 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +00001017
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +00001018- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
1019 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
1020 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
1021 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
1022 This has been repaired.
1023
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +00001024- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
1025
1026- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
1027
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +00001028- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
1029 over a sequence.
1030
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001031- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001032 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +00001033
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +00001034- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
1035
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +00001036- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
1037 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
1038 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
1039 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
1040 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
1041 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
1042 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
1043 records with equal keys is unchanged).
1044
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +00001045- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
1046 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
1047 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
1048
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +00001049- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
1050 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
1051 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
1052 freelist.
1053
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +00001054- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
1055 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
1056
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +00001057- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
1058 number.
1059
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +00001060- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
1061 a TypeError exception.
1062
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +00001063- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
1064 820195.
1065
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +00001066- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
1067 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
1068 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
1069
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001070- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +00001071 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
1072 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +00001073
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +00001074- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
1075 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
1076 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
1077
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001078- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
1079 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001080 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001081
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001082- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +00001083 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
1084 the first call.
1085
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +00001086
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001087Extension modules
1088-----------------
1089
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +00001090- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
1091 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
1092
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001093- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
1094 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
1095 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
1096 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
1097 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
1098 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
1099 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +00001100
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +00001101- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
1102
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +00001103- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
1104
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +00001105- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
1106 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
1107
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +00001108- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
1109 fewer false positives.
1110
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +00001111- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
1112 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
1113
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001114- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +00001115 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
1116
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +00001117- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001118 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +00001119 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
Raymond Hettinger6ab78cd2004-08-29 07:50:43 +00001120 Also, array.array() and array.extend() now accept any iterable argument
1121 for repeated appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +00001122
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +00001123- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
1124 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
1125 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
1126 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
1127
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +00001128- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
1129 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
1130 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
1131 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
1132 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
1133 #897625.
1134
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +00001135- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
1136 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
1137
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +00001138- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
1139 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
1140 and pops on either side of the deque.
1141
1142- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
1143 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
1144
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +00001145- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
1146 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
1147 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
1148 other functions that expect a function argument.
1149
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +00001150- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
1151
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001152- os.getsid was added.
1153
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +00001154- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
1155 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
1156 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
1157
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +00001158- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
1159
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +00001160- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
1161
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +00001162- readline.clear_history was added.
1163
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +00001164- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
1165
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +00001166- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
1167
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +00001168- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
1169
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +00001170- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
1171
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +00001172- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
1173
1174- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
1175
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +00001176- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
1177
1178- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
1179
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001180- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
1181 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
1182 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
1183
1184- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
1185 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
1186 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
1187 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
1188 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
1189 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
1190 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
1191
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +00001192- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
1193 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
1194 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
1195 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001196
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001197- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +00001198 iterators from a single iterable.
1199
1200- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
1201 of raising a TypeError exception.
1202
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +00001203- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
1204 as parameter.
1205
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001206Library
1207-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +00001208
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +00001209- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
1210 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
1211 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001212
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +00001213- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
1214 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
1215 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +00001216
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +00001217- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +00001218
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +00001219- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
1220 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +00001221
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +00001222- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
1223 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
1224
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001225- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
1226
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001227- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +00001228 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +00001229
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001230- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
Anthony Baxter1a4ddae2004-08-31 10:07:13 +00001231 that generate a -debuginfo.rpm
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001232
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +00001233- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
1234
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +00001235- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
1236 on cygwin and mingw32.
1237
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +00001238- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
1239
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +00001240- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
1241 module.
1242
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +00001243- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
1244 installation scheme for all platforms.
1245
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001246- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +00001247 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +00001248
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +00001249- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
1250 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
1251 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
1252
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +00001253- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
1254 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
1255 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
1256
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +00001257- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
1258
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +00001259- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
1260
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +00001261- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
1262 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
1263
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +00001264- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
1265 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
1266 type pattern with the same value exists.
1267
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +00001268- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
1269 when run from the command prompt).
1270
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +00001271- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
1272 not taken into consideration when caching value.
1273
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +00001274- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
1275 default sort).
1276
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +00001277- Added global runctx function to profile module
1278
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +00001279- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
1280
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +00001281- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
1282
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +00001283- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
1284
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +00001285- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +00001286 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
1287 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
1288 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
1289 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
1290 accordingly.
1291
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +00001292- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
1293 decoding standards.
1294
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +00001295- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
1296 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
1297 called for all requests.
1298
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +00001299- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
1300 they are passed to the compiler.
1301
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +00001302- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
1303 indent, width and depth.
1304
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +00001305- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
1306 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
1307
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +00001308- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
1309 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
1310
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +00001311- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
1312
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +00001313- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
1314
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +00001315- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
1316
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +00001317- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
1318 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
1319
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +00001320- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +00001321 for better performance.
1322
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +00001323- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +00001324
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +00001325- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
1326 a string).
1327
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +00001328- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
1329
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +00001330- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
1331
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +00001332- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
1333
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +00001334- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
1335
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +00001336- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
1337 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
1338 list of fieldnames.
1339
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +00001340- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
1341 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
1342
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +00001343- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
1344
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +00001345- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
1346 empty lists.
1347
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +00001348- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
1349 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
1350 and shelves.
1351
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +00001352- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
1353 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
1354
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001355- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +00001356 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
1357 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +00001358
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +00001359- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
1360 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +00001361 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +00001362
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001363- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +00001364 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
1365 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
1366
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +00001367- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
1368 and removed in Py2.4.
1369
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +00001370- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
1371
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +00001372- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
1373
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001374Tools/Demos
1375-----------
1376
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +00001377- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
1378 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
1379
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +00001380- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
1381
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +00001382- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
1383 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
1384 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
1385 destination in situations where both files are given.
1386
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +00001387- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
1388 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
1389 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
1390 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
1391
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +00001392- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
1393
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +00001394- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
1395 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
1396 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
1397 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
1398 now.
1399
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001400- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
1401 in effect
1402
1403- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
1404 C-c C-h
1405
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +00001406- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
1407 -d option was given.
1408
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001409Build
1410-----
1411
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +00001412- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
1413 build under OS X.
1414
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +00001415- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
1416 --enable-profiling.
1417
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +00001418- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
1419 is configured --with-tsc.
1420
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +00001421- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
1422 on AMD64.
1423
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +00001424- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
1425 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
1426
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +00001427- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
1428 removed.
1429
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +00001430- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
1431 supported (see PEP 11).
1432
1433- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
1434
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +00001435- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
1436
1437- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
1438 (see PEP 11).
1439
1440- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
1441 sizeof(char) must be 1.
1442
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001443C API
1444-----
1445
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +00001446- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
1447 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
1448 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
1449
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +00001450- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
1451 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
1452 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
1453 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
1454
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +00001455- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
1456 generator objects.
1457
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001458- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
1459 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +00001460 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
1461 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +00001462
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +00001463- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
1464 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
1465
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +00001466- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
1467 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
1468 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
1469 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
1470 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
1471
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +00001472- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
1473 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
1474 about 10% faster.
1475
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +00001476- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
1477 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
1478
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +00001479- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
1480 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
1481 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
1482 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
1483
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001484Windows
1485-------
1486
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +00001487- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
1488 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
1489 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
1490 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
1491
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +00001492- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
1493 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
1494 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
1495
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +00001496
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001497What's New in Python 2.3 final?
1498===============================
1499
1500*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
1501
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001502IDLE
1503----
1504
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +00001505- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
1506 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
1507 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
1508 context-menu actions.
1509
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001510- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
1511 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
1512 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
1513 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
1514 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
1515 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
1516 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
1517 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
1518 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
1519
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +00001520
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001521What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
1522=============================================
1523
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +00001524*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001525
1526Core and builtins
1527-----------------
1528
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001529- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001530 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +00001531 comment at the end are still unsupported.
1532
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001533Extension modules
1534-----------------
1535
1536- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
1537 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
1538 than once. This has been fixed.
1539
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +00001540- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
1541 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
1542 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
1543 call.
1544
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001545- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
1546
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001547Library
1548-------
1549
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001550- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
1551 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
1552
1553- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
1554 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
1555 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
1556 restored.
1557
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001558IDLE
1559----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001560
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +00001561- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001562
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001563Build
1564-----
1565
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001566- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
1567 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
1568
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001569C API
1570-----
1571
1572Windows
1573-------
1574
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +00001575- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
1576 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
1577
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001578- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
1579
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001580Mac
1581---
1582
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +00001583- Various fixes to pimp.
1584
1585- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
1586
1587- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
1588 more problems than it solves.
1589
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001590
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001591What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1592=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001593
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001594*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1595
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001596Core and builtins
1597-----------------
1598
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001599- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1600 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1601
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001602- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1603 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001604 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001605
1606- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1607 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1608 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001609 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001610
1611- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1612 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001613
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001614- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1615 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1616 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1617
1618- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001619 770247.
1620
1621- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001622
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001623Extension modules
1624-----------------
1625
1626- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1627 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1628
1629- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1630
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001631- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1632
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001633- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1634 contained within the _strptime module.
1635
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001636- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1637 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1638
1639- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001640 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1641
1642- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1643 the find_class attribute, if present.
1644
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001645- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001646
1647 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1648 (SF bug 763298).
1649
1650 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001651 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1652 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1653 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001654
1655 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1656
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001657Library
1658-------
1659
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001660- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1661
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001662- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1663 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1664 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1665 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1666 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1667 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1668 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1669 or Tester().
1670
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001671- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1672 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1673 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1674 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1675 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1676 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1677 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1678 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1679 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001680
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001681 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001682
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001683- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1684 weren't before was an oversight.
1685
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001686- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1687 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1688
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001689- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1690 when there are no lines.
1691
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001692- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1693 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1694
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001695- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1696 to child processes.
1697
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001698- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1699
1700- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1701
1702- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1703 xmlrpclib.
1704
1705- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1706 responses.
1707
1708- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1709 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1710
1711- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1712 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1713 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1714
1715- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1716 used as patterns.
1717
1718- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1719 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1720 than Tk 8.3.
1721
1722- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1723
1724- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001725
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001726Tools/Demos
1727-----------
1728
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001729- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1730
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001731- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1732
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001733- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001734
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001735Build
1736-----
1737
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001738- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1739
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001740- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1741
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001742- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1743 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001744
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001745- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1746 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1747 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001748
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001749C API
1750-----
1751
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001752- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1753 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1754
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001755Windows
1756-------
1757
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001758- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1759 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1760 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1761 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1762 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1763 Python exception ::
1764
1765 thread.error: can't start new thread
1766
1767 is raised now.
1768
1769- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1770 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1771 instead of from DLL teardown.
1772
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001773Mac
1774---
1775
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001776- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001777 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001778 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1779 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1780 the executable in the bundle.
1781
1782- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001783
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001784- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1785
1786- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1787 on Panther.
1788
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001789What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1790================================
1791
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001792*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001793
1794Core and builtins
1795-----------------
1796
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001797- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1798 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1799 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1800 with the -i option.
1801
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001802- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1803 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1804
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001805- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1806 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1807
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001808- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1809 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1810 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1811 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1812 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1813 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1814 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1815 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1816 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1817 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1818 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1819 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1820 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001821
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001822- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1823 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1824 embedded in a lambda expression.
1825
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001826- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1827 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1828 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1829 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1830 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1831
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001832- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1833 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1834 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1835
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001836- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1837 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1838
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001839- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1840 It's writable again.
1841
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001842- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1843 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1844 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001845 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001846
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001847- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1848 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1849 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1850
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001851Extension modules
1852-----------------
1853
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001854- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1855 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1856
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001857- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1858 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1859 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1860 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1861
1862- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1863 collection.
1864
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001865- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1866 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1867 unique within a single program run.
1868
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001869- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1870 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1871
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001872- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1873 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1874
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001875- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1876 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001877
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001878- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1879
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001880- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1881 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1882
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001883- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1884 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1885 for many BSD-derived systems.
1886
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001887
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001888Library
1889-------
1890
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001891- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1892 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1893 primary ones:
1894
1895 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1896 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1897 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1898
1899 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1900 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1901 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1902 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1903 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1904 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1905
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001906- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1907 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1908 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1909 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1910 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1911 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1912 argument.
1913
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001914- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1915 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1916 in the archive.
1917
1918- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1919 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1920
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001921- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1922 569574).
1923
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001924- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1925 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1926 no more.
1927
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001928- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1929 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1930 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1931 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1932 code coverage.
1933
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001934- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1935 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1936 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001937 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1938 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001939
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001940- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1941 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1942 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001943 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001944
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001945- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1946
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001947- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1948 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1949 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1950 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1951
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001952- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1953 handling.
1954
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001955- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1956 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1957
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001958- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1959 in socket.py.
1960
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001961- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1962
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001963- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1964 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1965 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1966 opener with proxy support.
1967
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001968- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1969
1970- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1971
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001972Tools/Demos
1973-----------
1974
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001975- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1976
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001977- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1978
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001979- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1980 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001981
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001982- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1983 files.
1984
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001985Build
1986-----
1987
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001988- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001989 different root directory.
1990
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001991C API
1992-----
1993
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001994- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1995 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1996 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1997 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1998 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1999 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
2000 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
2001 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
2002 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
2003 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
2004
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002005- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
2006 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
2007 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
2008 from Python.
2009
2010
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002011New platforms
2012-------------
2013
2014None this time.
2015
2016Tests
2017-----
2018
2019- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
2020 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
2021
2022Windows
2023-------
2024
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00002025- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
2026
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00002027- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
2028 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
2029 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
2030 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
2031 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
2032 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
2033 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
2034 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
2035 that's what it's for.
2036
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002037Mac
2038---
2039
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00002040- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
2041 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
2042 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
2043 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00002044- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
2045 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
2046- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00002047
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00002048SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
2049------------------------------------
2050
2051430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
2052598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
2053622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
2054661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
2055683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
2056697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
2057713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
2058724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
2059727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
2060729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
2061730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
2062731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
2063732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
2064733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
2065735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
2066740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
2067744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
2068745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
2069747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
2070749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
2071751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
2072753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
2073755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
2074757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
2075760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
2076
2077
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002078What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
2079================================
2080
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00002081*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002082
2083Core and builtins
2084-----------------
2085
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00002086- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
2087 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
2088
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00002089- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
2090 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
2091 and cannot be strings).
2092
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00002093- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
2094 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
2095 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
2096 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
2097
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00002098- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
2099 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
2100 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
2101 Python itself.
2102
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00002103- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
2104 the referenced object, if it has one.
2105
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00002106- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
2107 the thread started at
2108 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
2109
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00002110- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
2111 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
2112 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
2113 placed on a list index.
2114
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00002115- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
2116 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
2117 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
2118 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
2119
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002120- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
2121 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
2122 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
2123 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
2124 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
2125 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
2126 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
2127
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00002128- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
2129 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
2130 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
2131 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
2132 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
2133
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00002134- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
2135 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00002136
2137- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
2138 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
2139 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
2140 #693195.)
2141
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00002142- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
2143 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002144
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002145- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00002146 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00002147 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
2148 interpreter executions, would fail.
2149
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002150- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00002151 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00002152 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00002153
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002154Extension modules
2155-----------------
2156
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00002157- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
2158 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
2159 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
2160 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
2161
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00002162- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
2163 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
2164
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00002165- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
2166 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
2167 and Greg Chapman.)
2168
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002169- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
2170 recursively.
2171
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00002172- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00002173 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
2174 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
2175 leaks.
2176
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00002177- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
2178
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00002179- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
2180 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
2181 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
2182 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
2183 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
2184 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
2185 #705836.
2186
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00002187- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00002188 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
2189
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00002190- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
2191 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
2192 See SF bug #692416.
2193
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00002194- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
2195 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
2196
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00002197- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
2198 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
2199 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002200
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002201- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00002202 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
2203 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
2204
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00002205- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
2206 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
2207 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
2208 timeouts to work properly.
2209
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002210Library
2211-------
2212
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00002213- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
2214 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
2215 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
2216 future release.
2217
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00002218- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
2219 for querying platform dependent features.
2220
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00002221- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00002222
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00002223- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
2224 pickle protocol versions.
2225
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00002226- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
2227 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
2228 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
2229
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00002230- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
2231
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00002232- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
2233 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
2234 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
2235 modules.
2236
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00002237- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
2238 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
2239 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
2240
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00002241- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
2242 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
2243
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00002244- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
2245 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
2246 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
2247
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002248- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00002249 MS Office extensions.
2250
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00002251- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
2252 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
2253
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00002254- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
2255 execution speed of expressions and statements.
2256
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002257- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
2258 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
2259 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
2260 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
2261 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
2262 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
2263
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002264- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
2265 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
2266 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002267
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00002268- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
2269 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
2270 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
2271
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00002272- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
2273
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00002274- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
2275 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
2276 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
2277
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002278Tools/Demos
2279-----------
2280
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00002281- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
2282 See the module docstring for details.
2283
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002284Build
2285-----
2286
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00002287- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
2288 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002289
2290C API
2291-----
2292
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002293- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
2294
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00002295- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
2296 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
2297 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
2298
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002299- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
2300 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002301
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00002302 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
2303 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
2304 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00002305
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00002306- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00002307 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
2308
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00002309- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
2310 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
2311 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002312
2313New platforms
2314-------------
2315
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00002316None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002317
2318Tests
2319-----
2320
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00002321- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
2322 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002323
2324Windows
2325-------
2326
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00002327- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
2328 function.
2329
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00002330- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
2331 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002332
2333Mac
2334---
2335
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00002336- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
2337 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00002338
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00002339- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
2340 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002341
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00002342- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
2343 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
2344 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002345
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002346- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00002347 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
2348 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00002349
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00002350- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
2351 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00002352
2353
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002354What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
2355=================================
2356
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002357*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002358
2359Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002360-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002361
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00002362- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
2363 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
2364 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
2365
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00002366- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
2367 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
2368 (SF patch #664376.)
2369
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002370- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
2371 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
2372 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
2373 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
2374 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
2375 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00002376 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00002377
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002378- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
2379 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
2380 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
2381 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002382 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00002383
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00002384- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
2385 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
2386 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
2387 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
2388 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
2389 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
2390 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
2391 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
2392 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
2393 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
2394 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
2395
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00002396- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
2397 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
2398 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
2399 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
2400 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
2401 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
2402
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00002403- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
2404 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
2405
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00002406- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
2407 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
2408 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
2409 case.)
2410
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00002411- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
2412 passed as unicode strings.
2413
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00002414- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
2415 See SF bug #683467.
2416
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00002417- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
2418 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
2419
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00002420- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
2421
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00002422- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
2423
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00002424- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
2425 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
2426 arguments.
2427
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00002428- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
2429 See SF bug #667147.
2430
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002431- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002432 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00002433 See SF bug #676155.
2434
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002435- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002436 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00002437 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
2438 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
2439 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
2440 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
2441 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
2442 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00002443
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002444Extension modules
2445-----------------
2446
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002447- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
2448 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2449 tp_as_number pointer.
2450
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00002451- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
2452 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
2453 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
2454 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
2455 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
2456
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002457- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
2458
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00002459- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
2460
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002461- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00002462 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00002463 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
2464 patch #678531.)
2465
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00002466- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
2467 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
2468
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00002469- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
2470 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
2471
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00002472- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
2473
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00002474- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
2475 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
2476 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
2477
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002478- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
2479
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002480- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
2481 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
2482
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002483- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002484
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002485- datetime changes:
2486
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00002487 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
2488
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00002489 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
2490 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
2491 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
2492 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
2493 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
2494 now.
2495
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002496 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002497 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
2498 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00002499
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002500 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002501 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002502 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
2503 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
2504 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
2505 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002506
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002507 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
2508 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
2509 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00002510 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
2511
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00002512 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
2513 by a later example coded by Guido.
2514
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002515 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002516 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
2517 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
2518 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00002519 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
2520 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
2521
2522 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
2523 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
2524 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
2525 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
2526 tzinfo subclass instance.
2527
2528 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
2529 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
2530 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
2531 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
2532 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
2533 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
2534 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
2535 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00002536
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002537 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
2538 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
2539 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
2540 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
2541 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002542 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
2543
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002544 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002545
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00002546 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
2547 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
2548 as a naive datetime object.
2549
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00002550 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
2551 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
2552 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
2553
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00002554 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
2555 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
2556 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
2557 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
2558 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
2559 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
2560 comparison.
2561
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002562 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
2563 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
2564 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
2565 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002566 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002567
2568 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002569
2570 and ::
2571
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002572 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
2573
2574 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
2575 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
2576 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
2577 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
2578
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00002579 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
2580 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
2581 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
2582 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
2583 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
2584
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002585 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
2586 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00002587 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
2588 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00002589
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002590Library
2591-------
2592
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002593- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2594 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2595
2596- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2597 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2598 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2599 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2600 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2601 See PEP 307 for details.
2602
2603- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2604 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2605
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002606- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2607 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002608 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002609 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2610 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002611 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002612
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002613- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2614 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2615
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002616- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2617 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2618 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2619
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002620- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2621
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002622- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2623 exception.
2624
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002625- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2626 class.
2627
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002628- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2629 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2630 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2631
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002632- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2633 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2634
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002635- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002636 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2637 See SF bug #659228.
2638
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002639- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2640 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2641 See SF patch #651082.
2642
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002643- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002644
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002645- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2646 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2647
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002648- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002649 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002650
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002651- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2652 DOS paths from other platforms.
2653
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002654Tools/Demos
2655-----------
2656
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002657- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2658 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2659 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2660 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2661 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2662 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2663 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2664 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2665 example:
2666
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002667 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2668 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002669
2670 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2671
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002672
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002673Build
2674-----
2675
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002676- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2677 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2678 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002679 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2680
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002681 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2682
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002683- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2684 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2685 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2686 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2687 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2688 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2689 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2690 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2691 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2692
2693- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2694 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2695 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2696 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2697
2698- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2699 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2700
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002701C API
2702-----
2703
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002704- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2705 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002706
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002707- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2708 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2709 tp_as_number pointer.
2710
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002711- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2712 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2713 (SF #681367)
2714
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002715- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2716 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2717 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2718 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002719
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002720Tests
2721-----
2722
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002723- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002724 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2725 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2726 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2727 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2728 pydoc.)
2729
2730- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2731
2732- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002733
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002734Windows
2735-------
2736
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002737- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2738 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2739 time).
2740
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002741- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2742 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2743
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002744- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2745 release without strong cryptography.
2746
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002747- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002748 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002749
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002750- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2751 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2752
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002753Mac
2754---
2755
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002756- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2757 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002758
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002759- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2760 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2761 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002762
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002763- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2764 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002765
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002766- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2767 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2768 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2769 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002770
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002771- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002772 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2773 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2774 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002775
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002776
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002777What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002778=================================
2779
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002780*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002781
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002782Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002783--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002784
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002785- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2786
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002787- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2788 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002789 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002790 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002791 a different meaning than before.
2792
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002793- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002794 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002795 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002796
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002797- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002798 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002799 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002800
2801- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2802 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2803 and deallocation.
2804
2805- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2806 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2807
2808- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2809 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2810 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2811 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2812 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2813
2814- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2815 now detected by the garbage collector.
2816
2817- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2818 [SF bug 519621]
2819
2820- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2821 identifier.
2822
2823- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2824 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2825 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2826 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2827 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2828 [SF bug 563060]
2829
2830- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2831 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2832 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2833 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2834 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2835
2836- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2837 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2838 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2839
2840- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2841
2842- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2843 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2844 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2845 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2846 state of the slots would be lost.)
2847
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002848Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002849-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002850
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002851- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002852 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2853 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2854 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2855 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002856 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2857 Jython 2.1.
2858
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002859- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002860 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002861 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2862 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2863 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2864 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2865 these, see PEP 302.
2866
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002867- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2868 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2869 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2870
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002871- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2872 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2873 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2874
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002875- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2876 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2877 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2878
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002879- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2880 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2881 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2882 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2883 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2884 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2885 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2886 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2887 releases or implementations.
2888
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002889- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002890 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2891 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002892
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002893- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2894 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2895
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002896- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2897 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2898 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2899
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002900- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2901 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2902
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002903- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2904 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002905 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2906 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002907
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002908- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2909 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2910 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2911 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2912 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2913
2914 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2915 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2916 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2917 pattern.
2918
2919 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2920 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2921 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2922 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2923
2924 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2925 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2926 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2927 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2928 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2929 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2930
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002931- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2932 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2933 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2934 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2935 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2936 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2937 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2938 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002939
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002940- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2941 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2942 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2943 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2944 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002945 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2946 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2947 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2948 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2949 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2950 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2951 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002952
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002953- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2954 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2955
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002956- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2957 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2958 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2959 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2960 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2961 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2962 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2963 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2964 to Zack Weinberg!
2965
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002966- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2967 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2968 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2969 type. This has been fixed now.
2970
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002971- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2972 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2973 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2974
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002975- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2976 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2977 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2978 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2979 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2980 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2981 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2982 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002983 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002984
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002985- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2986 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2987 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002988
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002989- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2990 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2991 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2992 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2993 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2994 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2995 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2996 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002997 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002998 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2999 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
3000
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00003001- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
3002 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
3003 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
3004 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
3005 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
3006 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
3007 this.)
3008
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003009- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
3010 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00003011 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003012 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00003013 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
3014 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00003015 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
3016 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00003017
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00003018- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
3019 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
3020 currently running.
3021
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00003022- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
3023 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
3024 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
3025 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
3026
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00003027- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
3028 as directory names.
3029
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00003030- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
3031 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
3032
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00003033- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
3034 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
3035
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003036- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00003037 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
3038 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00003039
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00003040- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
3041 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
3042 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
3043 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
3044 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
3045
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003046- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
3047 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
3048 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
3049 removed.
3050
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00003051- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
3052 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
3053 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
3054
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00003055- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
3056 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
3057 to __debug__.
3058
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00003059- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
3060 string to the left with zeros. For example,
3061 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
3062
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00003063- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
3064 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
3065 deprecated now.
3066
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00003067- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
3068 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
3069 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00003070
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00003071- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
3072 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
3073 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
3074 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
3075 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00003076
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00003077- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
3078 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
3079
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003080- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
3081 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
3082 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003083 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00003084 is backward compatible.
3085
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00003086- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
3087 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
3088 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
3089 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
3090 could access a pointer to freed memory.
3091
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00003092- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
3093 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
3094 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
3095 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
3096 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
3097 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003098
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00003099- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
3100 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
3101
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003102- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
3103 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
3104
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003105- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
3106 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
3107 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
3108 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
3109 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
3110
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00003111- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
3112 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
3113 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
3114
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003115- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00003116 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
3117
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00003118- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
3119 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
3120 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00003121
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00003122- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
3123 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
3124
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00003125- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
3126 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
3127 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
3128
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00003129- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
3130
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003131Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003132-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003133
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00003134- Added three operators to the operator module:
3135 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
3136 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
3137 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
3138
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00003139- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
3140
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00003141- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
3142 archives.
3143
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003144- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
3145 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
3146 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
3147
3148 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
3149
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003150- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
3151 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
3152 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00003153 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00003154
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00003155- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
3156 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
3157 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
3158 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00003159 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
3160 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
3161 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
3162 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00003163
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00003164- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
3165 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00003166
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00003167- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
3168
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00003169- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
3170 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
3171
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00003172- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
3173 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
3174 supported.
3175
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00003176- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
3177
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00003178- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
3179 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00003180
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00003181- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
3182 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
3183
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00003184- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
3185
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003186- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
3187 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
3188
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00003189- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
3190 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
3191 functions but callable type objects.
3192
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003193- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003194 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003195 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00003196
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00003197- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
3198 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00003199
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00003200- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
3201 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00003202
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00003203- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
3204 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
3205 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
3206 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
3207
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00003208- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
3209 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00003210
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00003211- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
3212 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
3213 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
3214 and __imul__.
3215
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00003216- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00003217 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
3218 is called.
3219
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00003220- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
3221 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
3222 interpreter was compiled.
3223
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003224- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
3225 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
3226 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003227 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00003228 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
3229 1, not 2.
3230
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00003231- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
3232 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
3233 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
3234 limit.
3235
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00003236- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
3237 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
3238 bug #623464.
3239
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00003240- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
3241 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
3242 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
3243 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
3244
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003245Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003246-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003247
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00003248- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
3249
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00003250- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
3251 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
3252 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
3253 with Python 2.3a2.
3254
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00003255- os.path exposes getctime.
3256
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003257- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003258 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003259 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003260 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003261 unit tests of floating point results.
3262
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00003263- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
3264 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
3265 has been increased.
3266
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00003267- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
3268 executed.
3269
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00003270- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
3271 postinstallation script.
3272
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00003273- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
3274 test the current module.
3275
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003276- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00003277 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
3278 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
3279 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
3280 this behavior needs to be controlled.
3281
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003282- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003283 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00003284 Ward's Optik package.
3285
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003286- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
3287 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
3288 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
3289 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
3290
3291- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
3292 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00003293 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00003294
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00003295- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
3296 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
3297 shelf are binary pickles.
3298
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00003299- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
3300 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
3301
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00003302- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
3303 modules are iterators now.
3304
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00003305- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
3306 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
3307 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
3308 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
3309 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
3310 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003311
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00003312- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
3313 with their entity value.
3314
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00003315- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
3316
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003317- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
3318 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00003319
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00003320- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
3321 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00003322 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00003323
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00003324- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
3325 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
3326 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
3327 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
3328 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
3329 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
3330 main():
3331
3332 import locale
3333 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
3334
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00003335- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
3336 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
3337
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00003338- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
3339 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
3340 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
3341 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
3342 to the new standard.
3343
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00003344- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
3345 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
3346 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
3347 an extension to the database.
3348
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003349- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
3350 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
3351 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
3352 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00003353 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00003354
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003355- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00003356 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00003357
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00003358- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
3359 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
3360 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
3361 bounded integers.
3362
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00003363- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
3364 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
3365 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
3366 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
3367 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
3368 in existence.
3369
3370 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
3371 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
3372 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
3373 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
3374 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
3375 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
3376
3377 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
3378 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
3379 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
3380 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
3381
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00003382- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
3383 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
3384 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
3385
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00003386- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
3387
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003388- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
3389 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
3390 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
3391 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
3392
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00003393- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
3394 argument.
3395
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00003396- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
3397 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
3398 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
3399 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
3400 [SF patch 560794].
3401
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003402- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
3403 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
3404 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00003405 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
3406 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
3407 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00003408
3409- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
3410 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00003411
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00003412- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
3413 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
3414 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
3415 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00003416
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00003417- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
3418 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
3419 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
3420 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
3421 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
3422
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003423- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00003424
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00003425- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
3426
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00003427- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
3428 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
3429 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
3430 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
3431 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
3432 identical to None.
3433
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00003434- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
3435 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
3436 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
3437 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
3438 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
3439 results now.
3440
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00003441- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
3442 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
3443
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00003444- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
3445 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
3446 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
3447 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
3448 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
3449 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
3450 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
3451 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
3452
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00003453- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
3454
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00003455- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
3456 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
3457
3458- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
3459 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
3460 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
3461 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
3462 and other systems.
3463
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00003464- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
3465 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
3466 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
3467 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 +00003468 work well with these.
3469
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00003470- compileall now supports quiet operation.
3471
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003472- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00003473 connections.
3474
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00003475- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
3476 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
3477 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
3478
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00003479- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
3480 sets
3481
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00003482- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
3483 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
3484 name.
3485
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00003486- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
3487 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
3488 passed in.
3489
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003490- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00003491 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00003492 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
3493 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00003494
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00003495- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
3496
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00003497- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
3498
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00003499- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
3500 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
3501 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
3502
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003503- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
3504 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
3505 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
3506 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00003507 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00003508
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003509- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003510 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003511 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00003512
3513- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
3514 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
3515 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
3516
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00003517- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00003518 the value of its expression argument.
3519
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00003520- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
3521 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
3522 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
3523
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00003524- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
3525 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
3526 skipstone browser was included.
3527
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00003528- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
3529 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
3530
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003531Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003532-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003533
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00003534- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
3535 names in addition to accepting file names.
3536
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00003537- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
3538 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
3539 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
3540 still used and useful.)
3541
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00003542- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
3543 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
3544 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
3545 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00003546
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00003547- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
3548 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
3549 the generated binary.
3550
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003551Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003552-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003553
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00003554- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
3555
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003556- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
3557 except in the hands of experts.
3558
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00003559- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00003560 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
3561 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
3562 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00003563
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00003564- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
3565 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
3566 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
3567 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
3568 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
3569 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
3570 builds.
3571
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00003572- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
3573 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
3574 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
3575 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
3576 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
3577 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
3578 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
3579 new type.
3580
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00003581- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00003582
3583 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
3584 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
3585 positive infinities.
3586
3587 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
3588 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
3589 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
3590 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3591 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3592 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3593 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3594
3595 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3596
3597 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3598
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003599- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3600 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3601 size of the executable.
3602
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003603- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3604 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3605 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3606 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003607
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003608- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3609
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003610- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3611 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3612 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003613
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003614- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3615 well as Unix.
3616
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003617- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3618 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3619 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3620 modules in the README file for details.
3621
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003622C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003623-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003624
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003625- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3626 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003627 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003628 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003629 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003630
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003631- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3632 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3633 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3634 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3635 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3636 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003637 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003638 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3639 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3640 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3641 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3642 aligned.)
3643
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003644- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3645 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3646 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3647
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003648- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3649 level.
3650
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003651- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3652 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3653 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3654 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3655 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3656
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003657- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3658 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3659 code.
3660
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003661- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3662 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3663 adjusting for negative indices.
3664
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003665- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3666 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3667 object.
3668
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003669- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3670 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3671 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3672
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003673- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3674 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003675
3676- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3677
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003678- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3679 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3680 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3681 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3682
3683- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3684
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003685- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003686
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003687- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003688 without going through the buffer API.
3689
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003690- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003691
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003692- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3693 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3694 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3695 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3696
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003697- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3698 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3699
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003700- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003701 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3702
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003703New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003704-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003705
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003706- OpenVMS is now supported.
3707
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003708- AtheOS is now supported.
3709
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003710- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3711
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003712- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3713
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003714Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003715-----
3716
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003717- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3718 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3719 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003720
3721Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003722-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003723
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003724- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3725 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3726 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3727 bugs.
3728 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003729 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003730 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3731 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003732 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003733
3734- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003735 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003736
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003737- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3738 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3739
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003740- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3741 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003742 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003743 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3744
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003745- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3746 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3747 use files" uninstall option).
3748
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003749- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3750
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003751- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3752 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3753
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003754- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3755 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3756 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3757
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003758- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3759 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3760 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3761 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3762 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003763 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3764 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3765 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003766
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003767- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003768 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003769 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3770 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3771 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3772 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3773 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3774 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3775 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3776 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3777 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3778 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3779 work around.
3780
3781- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3782 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3783 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3784 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3785 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3786 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3787 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3788 specified with O_CREAT too).
3789
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003790Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003791----
3792
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003793- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003794
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003795- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3796 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3797 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3798
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003799- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3800 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3801 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3802
3803- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3804 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3805 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3806 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3807 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3808 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3809 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3810 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003811
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003812- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3813 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3814 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003815
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003816- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3817 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3818 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3819 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3820 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003821
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003822- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3823 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3824 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003825
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003826- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3827 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003828
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003829- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3830 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3831 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3832 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3833 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003834
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003835- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3836 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3837 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3838
3839- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3840 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3841 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003842
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003843- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3844 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3845 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3846 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003847 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003848
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003849- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3850 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003851
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003852- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3853 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003854
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003855- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003856 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003857 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3858 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003859
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003860
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003861What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003862===============================
3863
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003864*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3865
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003866Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003867--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003868
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003869- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3870 with a custom metaclass.
3871
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003872Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003873-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003874
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003875- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3876 are proxies.
3877
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003878Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003879-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003880
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003881- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3882 very short strings.
3883
3884- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3885 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3886 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3887 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3888 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3889
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003890Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003891-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003892
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003893- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3894 close or delete time).
3895
3896- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3897 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3898
3899- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3900
3901- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003902 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003903
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003904Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003905-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003906
3907Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003908-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003909
3910C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003911-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003912
3913New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003914-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003915
3916Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003917-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003918
3919Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003920-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003921
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003922- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3923
3924- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3925 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3926
3927- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3928 deleted at process exit time.
3929
3930- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3931 in backslash.
3932
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003933Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003934----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003935
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003936- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3937 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3938 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3939
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003940
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003941What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003942===========================
3943
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003944*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3945
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003946Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003947--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003948
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003949- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3950 been extensively updated. See
3951
3952 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3953
3954 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3955
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003956- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3957 deleted!
3958
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003959- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3960 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3961 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3962 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3963 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3964
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003965- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3966
3967 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3968 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3969
3970 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3971 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3972 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3973 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3974 supported anyway.
3975
3976 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3977 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3978
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003979- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3980 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3981 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3982 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3983 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003984
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003985- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3986 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3987 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3988
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003989Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003990-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003991
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003992- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3993 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3994 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3995 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3996 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3997 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003998 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3999 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
4000 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
4001 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004002
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00004003- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
4004 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
4005 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
4006
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004007Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004008-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004009
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004010- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
4011
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004012Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004013-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004014
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00004015- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
4016 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
4017 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
4018 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
4019 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
4020 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
4021
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00004022- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
4023
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00004024- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
4025
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00004026- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
4027
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004028- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
4029 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
4030 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
4031
4032- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
4033
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004034Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004035-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004036
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004037- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
4038 off a search on Google.
4039
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004040Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004041-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004042
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004043- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
4044 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
4045 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
4046 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
4047 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
4048 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
4049 other platforms should do likewise.
4050
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00004051- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
4052 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
4053 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
4054
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004055C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004056-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004057
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004058- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
4059 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
4060 producing key-value pairs.
4061
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004062- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00004063 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00004064 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
4065 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
4066 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
4067 previously went unchallenged.
4068
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004069New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004070-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004071
4072Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004073-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004074
4075Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004076-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004077
4078Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004079----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004080
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00004081- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
4082 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00004083
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00004084- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
4085 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
4086 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
4087 home.
4088
4089
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004090What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004091===========================
4092
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004093*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
4094
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004095Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004096--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004097
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004098- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
4099 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004100
4101 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00004102 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004103
4104 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
4105 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004106 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00004107 This needs to be documented.
4108
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00004109- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
4110 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
4111
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00004112- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
4113 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
4114 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
4115
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00004116- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
4117 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
4118
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004119- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
4120 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
4121 class forbids it).
4122
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00004123- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
4124 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
4125 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
4126
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004127- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
4128
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004129Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004130-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004131
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004132- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
4133 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004134 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00004135
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004136- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
4137 (like 1 + '').
4138
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004139Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004140-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004141
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004142- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
4143 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
4144 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
4145 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004146 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004147 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
4148
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00004149- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
4150 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
4151 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
4152 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
4153
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004154- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
4155 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004156 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
4157 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
4158 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00004159
4160- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
4161 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004162
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00004163- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
4164 bytes on its input.
4165
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004166Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004167-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004168
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00004169- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00004170 convenience function.
4171
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004172- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
4173 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
4174 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004175 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
4176 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
4177 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
4178 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
4179 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
4180 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00004181
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00004182- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
4183 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
4184 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
4185 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
4186
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00004187- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
4188 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
4189 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
4190
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004191- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
4192 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
4193 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
4194 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
4195
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004196- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
4197 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004198 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004199 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
4200 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
4201 new -l and -e options.
4202
4203- statcache is now deprecated.
4204
4205- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
4206 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004207 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004208 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
4209 time properly taken into account.
4210
4211- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
4212 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
4213 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
4214 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
4215
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004216Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004217-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004218
4219Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004220-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004221
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004222- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
4223 is built with libdb3 if available.
4224
4225- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
4226
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004227C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004228-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004229
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00004230- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
4231 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
4232 PySequence_Size().
4233
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004234- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
4235
4236- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
4237 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
4238 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
4239
4240- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
4241 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
4242
4243- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
4244 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
4245
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004246New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004247-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004248
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00004249- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
4250 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
4251
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00004252- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
4253 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
4254
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00004255- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
4256
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004257Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004258-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004259
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00004260- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
4261 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
4262
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004263Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004264-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004265
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004266Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004267----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00004268
4269- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
4270 removed completely in the next release.
4271
4272- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
4273 OSX.
4274
4275- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
4276 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
4277
4278- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
4279
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00004280
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004281What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004282===========================
4283
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004284*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
4285
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004286Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004287--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004288
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004289- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004290 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004291 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004292 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
4293 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00004294 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
4295 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00004296 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
4297 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00004298
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00004299- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
4300 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
4301
4302- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
4303 class methods, static methods, and properties.
4304
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004305Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004306-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004307
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00004308- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
4309 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
4310 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
4311 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
4312 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
4313 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
4314 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
4315 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
4316
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004317- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
4318 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
4319 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
4320 example).
4321
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004322- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004323 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004324 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004325 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00004326
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004327- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
4328 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
4329 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00004330 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004331
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004332- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
4333 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
4334 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
4335 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
4336 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
4337 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
4338
4339 isinstance(x, (A, B))
4340
4341 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
4342
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004343Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004344-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004345
4346- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
4347
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004348- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
4349
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004350- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
4351 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00004352
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00004353- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
4354 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
4355 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
4356 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
4357 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
4358 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00004359 attributes.
4360
4361- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
4362 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
4363 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00004364
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004365- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
4366 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
4367 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004368
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004369- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
4370 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
4371 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004372 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
4373 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
4374
4375- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
4376 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00004377
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00004378Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004379-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004380
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00004381- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
4382 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
4383
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004384- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
4385 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
4386 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
4387 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
4388
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00004389- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
4390 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
4391 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
4392 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
4393
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00004394 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
4395 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
4396 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
4397 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
4398 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
4399 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
4400 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
4401 without losing information).
4402
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004403- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004404 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
4405 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
4406 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
4407 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
4408 module).
4409
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00004410 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00004411 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
4412 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
4413 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
4414 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00004415
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00004416- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00004417 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
4418 encoding.
4419
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00004420- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
4421 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
4422
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004423- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004424 to allow saving the message body to a file.
4425
4426- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
4427 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
4428 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
4429 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
4430
4431- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
4432
4433- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
4434 ON, and OFF.
4435
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00004436- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
4437 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
4438
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004439Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004440-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00004441
4442- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
4443 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
4444 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004445
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004446- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
4447 been added: -X and -E.
4448
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004449Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004450-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004451
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00004452- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
4453 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
4454
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004455C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004456-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004457
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00004458- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
4459 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
4460 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
4461 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
4462 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
4463
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00004464- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
4465 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
4466 as long) arguments.
4467
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00004468- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
4469 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
4470 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
4471 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
4472 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
4473 report any bugs or strange behavior).
4474
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00004475- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
4476 input.
4477
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004478New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004479-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004480
4481Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004482-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004483
4484Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004485-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004486
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00004487- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
4488 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
4489 is created for .py and .pyw files.
4490
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004491- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
4492 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
4493 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004494 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004495
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004496 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
4497 # (SIGINT) behavior.
4498 import signal
4499 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004500
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004501 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004502 while 1:
4503 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004504 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004505 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
4506 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
4507 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
4508 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00004509
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00004510
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004511What's New in Python 2.2a4?
4512===========================
4513
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004514*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
4515
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004516Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004517--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004518
4519- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
4520 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
4521 documentation for all operations on list objects.
4522
4523- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
4524 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
4525 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
4526 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
4527 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
4528 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
4529 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004530
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004531- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004532 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00004533 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
4534 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
4535 associate a docstring with a property.
4536
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004537- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
4538 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
4539 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
4540 other built-in object types.
4541
4542- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
4543 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
4544 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
4545 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
4546 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
4547
4548- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
4549 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
4550
4551- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
4552 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004553 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004554 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
4555 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
4556 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
4557 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
4558 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
4559
4560- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
4561 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
4562 class.
4563
4564- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
4565 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
4566 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
4567 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
4568
4569- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
4570 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
4571 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
4572 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
4573
4574- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
4575 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
4576
4577- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
4578 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
4579 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
4580 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
4581 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00004582 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004583 with the same value as s.
4584
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00004585- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
4586
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004587Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004588----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00004589
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00004590- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4591
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004592- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4593 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4594 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4595 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4596 objects.
4597
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004598- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4599 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004600 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4601 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4602
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004603- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4604 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4605 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4606
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004607Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004608-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004609
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004610- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4611 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4612 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4613 by the instances.
4614
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004615- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4616 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4617 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4618
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004619- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4620 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4621 before the entire comparison is complete.
4622
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004623- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4624 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4625 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4626
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004627- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4628 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4629 getwriter().
4630
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004631- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4632 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4633
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004634- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004635 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4636 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4637
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004638- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4639 iterable object.
4640
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004641- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4642 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004643
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004644- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4645 authentication.
4646
4647- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4648 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004649
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004650- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004651 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4652 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4653 a sample driver.)
4654
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004655Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004656-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004657
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004658- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4659 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4660 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4661 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4662 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4663 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4664 kernel has large file support.
4665
4666- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4667 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4668 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4669 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4670 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4671
4672- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4673 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4674 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4675
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004676C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004677-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004678
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004679- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4680 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4681
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004682New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004683-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004684
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004685- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4686 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4687
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004688Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004689-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004690
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004691- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4692 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4693 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4694 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4695 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4696
4697- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4698 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4699 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4700 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4701
4702- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4703 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4704
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004705Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004706-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004707
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004708- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004709 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4710 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004711
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004712
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004713What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4714===========================
4715
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004716*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4717
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004718Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004719----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004720
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004721- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4722 big to represent as a C double.
4723
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004724- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4725 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4726 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4727 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4728 restriction).
4729
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004730- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4731 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4732 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4733 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4734 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4735
4736 >>> dir([])
4737 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4738 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4739 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4740 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4741 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4742 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4743 'reverse', 'sort']
4744
4745 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4746
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004747- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004748 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4749 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4750 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4751 OverflowError exception.
4752
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004753- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004754 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004755 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4756 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4757 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4758 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4759 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004760 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004761 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4762 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4763
4764 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4765 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4766 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4767 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004768
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004769- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004770 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4771 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4772 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4773 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4774 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4775 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4776 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4777 once it is created.
4778
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004779- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4780 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4781 (key, value) pairs.
4782
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004783- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004784 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4785 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4786
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004787- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4788 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4789 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4790 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4791 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004792
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004793- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004794 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4795 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4796
4797 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4798
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004799- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004800 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4801
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004802Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004803-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004804
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004805- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004806 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4807 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004808
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004809- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4810 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4811 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4812 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4813 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4814 in this area anymore).
4815
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004816- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4817 threading.Timer.
4818
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004819- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4820 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4821
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004822- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004823 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4824
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004825- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004826 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4827 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4828 converted to Python longs.
4829
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004830- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004831 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4832
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004833- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4834 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4835 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4836
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004837Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004838-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004839
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004840- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4841 division operators as per PEP 238.
4842
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004843Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004844-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004845
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004846- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4847 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4848 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4849 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4850
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004851C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004852-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004853
4854- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004855
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004856- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4857 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004858 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004859
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004860 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4861 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004862 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004863 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004864
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004865- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004866 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4867 module:
4868
4869 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004870
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004871 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4872 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004873
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004874 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4875 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004876
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004877 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4878
4879 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4880
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004881- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004882 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4883 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4884 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004885
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004886New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004887-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004888
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004889- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4890 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4891 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4892 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4893 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004894
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004895Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004896-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004897
4898Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004899-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004900
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004901- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4902 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4903 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4904 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004905 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4906 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4907 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4908 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4909 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004910
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004911- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004912 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4913
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004914
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004915What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4916===========================
4917
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004918*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4919
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004920Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004921-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004922
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004923- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4924 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4925
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004926- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4927 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4928 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004929
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004930- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4931 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4932 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4933 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004934
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004935- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4936
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004937- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004938
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004939Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004940-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004941
4942- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004943 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004944 the module docstring for details.
4945
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004946Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004947-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004948
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004949- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004950 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4951 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4952 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004953
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004954- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4955 Nick Mathewson.
4956
4957Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004958----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004959
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004960- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4961 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4962 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4963 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4964 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4965 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4966 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4967 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4968
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004969- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4970 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4971 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4972 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4973
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004974- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4975 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4976 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4977 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4978 come a long way).
4979
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004980- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4981 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4982 write filters for these warnings).
4983
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004984- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4985 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4986 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4987 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4988 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4989
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004990- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4991 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4992 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4993 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4994 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4995 older distribution.
4996
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004997Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004998-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004999
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005000- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
5001 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00005002 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00005003
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005004- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
5005 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
5006 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
5007
5008- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
5009
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005010- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
5011
5012- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
5013
5014- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
5015
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005016- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00005017
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00005018- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
5019
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005020New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005021-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005022
5023C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005024-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00005025
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00005026- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
5027 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
5028 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
5029 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
5030 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
5031 against buffer overruns.
5032
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005033- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005034 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
5035 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00005036 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
5037 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
5038 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
5039
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00005040- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
5041 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
5042 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
5043 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
5044 deprecated.
5045
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005046Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005047-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00005048
5049- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
5050 relevant is found.
5051
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00005052
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005053What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005054===========================
5055
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005056*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
5057
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005058Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005059----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005060
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005061- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
5062 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
5063 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
5064 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
5065 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
5066 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
5067 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
5068 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005069 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00005070 repaired.
5071
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005072- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00005073 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00005074 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
5075 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
5076 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
5077 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
5078 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
5079 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
5080 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
5081 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
5082
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00005083- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
5084 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
5085 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
5086 leading BMO character).
5087
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005088- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
5089 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
5090 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
5091
5092 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
5093 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
5094 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005095
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005096 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
5097 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
5098 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
5099 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
5100 for various simple to use conversions.
5101
5102 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
5103 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
5104
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005105 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5106 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
5107 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
5108 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
5109 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5110 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
5111 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5112 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
5113 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5114 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
5115 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5116 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
5117 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
5118 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
5119 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00005120
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005121- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
5122 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
5123 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005124 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005125 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005126
5127 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005128 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
5129 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
5130 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
5131 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
5132 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005133 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
5134 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00005135
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005136 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
5137 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
5138 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00005139 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005140
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00005141- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
5142 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
5143 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
5144 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
5145 floating arithmetic,
5146
5147 x = 9007199254740992.0
5148 print long(x)
5149
5150 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
5151 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
5152 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
5153 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
5154 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
5155 functions are of good quality).
5156
5157 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
5158 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
5159 algorithms to break.
5160
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00005161- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
5162 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
5163 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
5164 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
5165 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
5166 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
5167 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
5168 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
5169 order.
5170
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005171- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
5172 operation along the most common code paths.
5173
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005174- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
5175 the same as dict.has_key(x).
5176
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00005177- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
5178 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
5179 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
5180 {}.update(UserDict())
5181
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00005182- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
5183 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
5184 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
5185 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
5186 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
5187 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
5188 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
5189 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
5190
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00005191- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00005192 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005193
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005194 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00005195 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
5196 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00005197 join() method of strings
5198 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005199 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
5200 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005201 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00005202 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00005203
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00005204- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
5205 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
5206
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00005207- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
5208 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
5209
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00005210- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
5211 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
5212 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
5213 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
5214
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005215- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
5216 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005217 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00005218 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
5219 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00005220
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00005221- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
5222
5223
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005224Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005225-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005226
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005227- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005228 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00005229 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
5230 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
5231
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00005232- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
5233 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
5234
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00005235- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
5236 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
5237 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
5238 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
5239
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00005240- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
5241 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
5242 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
5243
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00005244- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
5245
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00005246- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
5247
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00005248- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
5249 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
5250 that are still imported into string.py).
5251
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005252- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
5253
5254- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
5255 Now it does.
5256
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005257- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
5258
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005259- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
5260 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
5261 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
5262 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
5263 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00005264 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
5265 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00005266
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00005267- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
5268 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
5269 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
5270 'help(object)'.
5271
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005272Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005273-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005274
5275- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005276 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005277 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
5278 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
5279
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00005280- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00005281 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
5282 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00005283
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005284C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005285-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00005286
5287- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
5288 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00005289
5290----
5291
5292**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**