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Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00001+++++++++++
2Python News
3+++++++++++
4
Skip Montanaro4a385832002-09-20 17:08:52 +00005(editors: check NEWS.help for information about editing NEWS using ReST.)
6
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +00007What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 2?
8=================================
9
10*Release date: XX-XXX-2004*
11
12Core and builtins
13-----------------
14
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000015- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000016 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000017
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000018- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000019 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000020 which was missing for no apparent reason.
21
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000022- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000023 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
24 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
25
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000026- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
27 types that support garbage collection.
28
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000029- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
30
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000031Extension modules
32-----------------
33
34Library
35-------
36
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +000037- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
38 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
39 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
40 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
41
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +000042- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
43 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
44
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +000045- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
46 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
47 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
48 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
49 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
50 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
51 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
52 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
53 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
54 by some other method in progress).
55
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000056- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
57 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
58 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +000059
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +000060- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
61
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +000062- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
63 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
64 AM Kuchling.
65
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +000066- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
67 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
68 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
69
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +000070- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
71 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
72 instead of unsigned.
73
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000074- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +000075 no longer part of the public API.
76
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +000077- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
78 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
79 string methods of the same name).
80
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +000081- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
82 SF patch 982681.
83
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000084- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +000085 SF patch 945642.
86
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000087- doctest unittest integration improvements:
88
89 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
90
91 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
92 DocTestSuites.
93
94- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
95 that provide thread-local data.
96
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000097Tools/Demos
98-----------
99
100Build
101-----
102
103C API
104-----
105
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000106- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
107 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
108
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000109Documentation
110-------------
111
112Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
113
114 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
115 assigning thier values
116
117 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
118
119 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
120
121
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000122New platforms
123-------------
124
125Tests
126-----
127
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000128- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
129 platforms that use the Makefile.
130
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000131Windows
132-------
133
134Mac
135---
136
137
138
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000139What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
140=================================
141
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000142*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000143
144Core and builtins
145-----------------
146
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000147- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
148 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
149 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
150 objects now (one object instead of three).
151
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000152- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
153 Windows DLLs.
154
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000155- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
156
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000157- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
158 a new .pyc magic.
159
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000160- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
161 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
162 be there.
163
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000164- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
165 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
166 the LC_NUMERIC category.
167
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000168- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
169 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
170 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
171
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000172- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
173
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000174- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
175 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
176 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000177
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000178- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
179 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
180
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000181- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
182
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000183- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000184 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000185
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000186- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
187
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000188- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
189
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000190- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
191 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
192
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000193- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
194 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
195 Fixes bug #858016 .
196
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000197- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
198 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
199 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
200
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000201- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
202 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
203 improves their performance (about 35%).
204
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000205- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
206 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
207 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
208
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000209- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
210 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
211 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
212 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
213
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000214- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
215 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
216 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
217 length is not known).
218
219- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
220 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000221 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
222 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000223 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
224
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000225- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
226 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
227
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000228- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
229 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
230 keyword arguments.
231
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000232- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
233 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
234 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
235
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000236- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
237 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
238 cases.
239
240- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
241 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
242 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
243 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
244 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
245 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
246 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
247 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
248 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
249 a release build.
250
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000251- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
252 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
253
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000254- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000255 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000256
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000257- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
258 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
259 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
260 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
261 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
262 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
263 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
264 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
265 destroyed.
266
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000267- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
268 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
269 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
270 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
271 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
272 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
273 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
274 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
275
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000276- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
277 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
278 character other than a space.
279
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000280- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
281 by the function object or by the method object, the function
282 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
283 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
284 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
285 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
286 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
287 attributes with the same name.
288
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000289- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
290 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
291 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
292 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
293 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
294 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
295 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
296 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
297 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
298 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
299 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
300 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
301 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
302 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000303
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000304- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
305 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
306 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
307 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
308 This has been repaired.
309
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000310- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
311
312- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
313
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000314- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
315 over a sequence.
316
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000317- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000318 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000319
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000320- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
321
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000322- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
323 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
324 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
325 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
326 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
327 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
328 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
329 records with equal keys is unchanged).
330
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000331- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
332 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
333 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
334
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000335- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
336 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
337 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
338 freelist.
339
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000340- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
341 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
342
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000343- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
344 number.
345
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000346- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
347 a TypeError exception.
348
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000349- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
350 820195.
351
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000352- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
353 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
354 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
355
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000356- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000357 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
358 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000359
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000360- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
361 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
362 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
363
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000364- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
365 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000366 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000367
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000368- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000369 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
370 the first call.
371
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000372
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000373Extension modules
374-----------------
375
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000376- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
377 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
378
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000379- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
380 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
381 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
382 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
383 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
384 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
385 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000386
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000387- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
388
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000389- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
390
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000391- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
392 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
393
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000394- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
395 fewer false positives.
396
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000397- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
398 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
399
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000400- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000401 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
402
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000403- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000404 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000405 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
406 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
407 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000408
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000409- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
410 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
411 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
412 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
413
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000414- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
415 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
416 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
417 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
418 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
419 #897625.
420
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000421- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
422 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
423
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000424- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
425 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
426 and pops on either side of the deque.
427
428- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
429 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
430
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000431- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
432 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
433 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
434 other functions that expect a function argument.
435
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000436- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
437
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000438- os.getsid was added.
439
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000440- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
441 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
442 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
443
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000444- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
445
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000446- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
447
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000448- readline.clear_history was added.
449
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000450- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
451
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000452- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
453
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000454- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
455
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000456- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
457
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000458- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
459
460- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
461
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000462- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
463
464- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
465
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000466- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
467 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
468 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
469
470- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
471 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
472 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
473 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
474 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
475 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
476 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
477
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000478- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
479 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
480 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
481 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000482
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000483- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000484 iterators from a single iterable.
485
486- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
487 of raising a TypeError exception.
488
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000489- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
490 as parameter.
491
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000492Library
493-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000494
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000495- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
496 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
497 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000498
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000499- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
500 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
501 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000502
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000503- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000504
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000505- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
506 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000507
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000508- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
509 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
510
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000511- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
512
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000513- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000514 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000515
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000516- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
517 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
518
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000519- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
520
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000521- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
522 on cygwin and mingw32.
523
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000524- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
525
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000526- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
527 module.
528
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000529- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
530 installation scheme for all platforms.
531
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000532- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000533 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000534
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000535- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
536 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
537 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
538
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000539- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
540 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
541 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
542
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000543- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
544
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000545- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
546
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000547- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
548 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
549
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000550- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
551 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
552 type pattern with the same value exists.
553
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000554- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
555 when run from the command prompt).
556
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000557- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
558 not taken into consideration when caching value.
559
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000560- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
561 default sort).
562
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000563- Added global runctx function to profile module
564
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000565- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
566
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000567- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
568
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000569- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
570
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000571- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000572 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
573 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
574 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
575 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
576 accordingly.
577
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000578- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
579 decoding standards.
580
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000581- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
582 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
583 called for all requests.
584
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000585- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
586 they are passed to the compiler.
587
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000588- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
589 indent, width and depth.
590
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000591- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
592 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
593
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000594- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
595 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
596
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000597- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
598
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000599- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
600
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000601- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
602
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000603- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
604 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
605
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000606- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000607 for better performance.
608
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000609- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000610
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000611- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
612 a string).
613
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000614- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
615
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000616- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
617
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000618- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
619
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000620- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
621
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000622- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
623 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
624 list of fieldnames.
625
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000626- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
627 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
628
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000629- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
630
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000631- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
632 empty lists.
633
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000634- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
635 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
636 and shelves.
637
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000638- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
639 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
640
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000641- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000642 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
643 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000644
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000645- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
646 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000647 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000648
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000649- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000650 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
651 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
652
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000653- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
654 and removed in Py2.4.
655
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000656- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
657
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000658- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
659
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000660Tools/Demos
661-----------
662
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000663- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
664 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
665
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000666- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
667
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000668- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
669 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
670 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
671 destination in situations where both files are given.
672
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000673- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
674 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
675 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
676 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
677
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000678- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
679
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000680- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
681 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
682 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
683 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
684 now.
685
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000686- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
687 in effect
688
689- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
690 C-c C-h
691
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000692- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
693 -d option was given.
694
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000695Build
696-----
697
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000698- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
699 build under OS X.
700
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000701- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
702 --enable-profiling.
703
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000704- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
705 is configured --with-tsc.
706
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000707- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
708 on AMD64.
709
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000710- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
711 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
712
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000713- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
714 removed.
715
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000716- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
717 supported (see PEP 11).
718
719- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
720
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000721- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
722
723- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
724 (see PEP 11).
725
726- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
727 sizeof(char) must be 1.
728
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000729C API
730-----
731
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000732- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
733 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
734 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
735
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000736- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
737 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
738 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
739 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
740
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000741- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
742 generator objects.
743
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000744- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
745 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000746 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
747 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000748
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000749- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
750 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
751
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000752- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
753 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
754 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
755 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
756 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
757
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000758- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
759 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
760 about 10% faster.
761
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000762- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
763 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
764
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000765- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
766 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
767 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
768 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
769
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000770Windows
771-------
772
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000773- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
774 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
775 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
776 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
777
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000778- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
779 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
780 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
781
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000782
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000783What's New in Python 2.3 final?
784===============================
785
786*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
787
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000788IDLE
789----
790
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000791- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
792 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
793 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
794 context-menu actions.
795
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000796- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
797 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
798 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
799 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
800 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
801 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
802 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
803 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
804 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
805
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000806
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000807What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
808=============================================
809
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000810*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000811
812Core and builtins
813-----------------
814
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000815- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000816 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000817 comment at the end are still unsupported.
818
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000819Extension modules
820-----------------
821
822- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
823 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
824 than once. This has been fixed.
825
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000826- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
827 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
828 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
829 call.
830
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000831- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
832
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000833Library
834-------
835
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000836- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
837 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
838
839- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
840 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
841 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
842 restored.
843
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000844IDLE
845----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000846
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000847- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000848
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000849Build
850-----
851
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000852- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
853 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
854
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000855C API
856-----
857
858Windows
859-------
860
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000861- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
862 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
863
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000864- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
865
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000866Mac
867---
868
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000869- Various fixes to pimp.
870
871- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
872
873- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
874 more problems than it solves.
875
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000876
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000877What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
878=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000879
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000880*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
881
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000882Core and builtins
883-----------------
884
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000885- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
886 by sys.setcheckinterval().
887
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000888- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
889 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000890 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000891
892- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
893 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
894 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000895 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000896
897- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
898 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000899
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000900- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
901 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
902 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
903
904- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000905 770247.
906
907- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000908
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000909Extension modules
910-----------------
911
912- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
913 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
914
915- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
916
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +0000917- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
918
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +0000919- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
920 contained within the _strptime module.
921
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000922- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
923 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
924
925- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000926 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
927
928- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
929 the find_class attribute, if present.
930
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000931- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000932
933 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
934 (SF bug 763298).
935
936 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +0000937 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
938 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
939 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000940
941 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
942
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000943Library
944-------
945
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000946- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
947
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +0000948- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
949 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
950 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
951 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
952 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
953 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
954 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
955 or Tester().
956
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000957- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
958 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
959 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
960 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
961 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
962 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
963 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
964 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
965 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +0000966
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000967 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +0000968
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +0000969- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
970 weren't before was an oversight.
971
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000972- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
973 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
974
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +0000975- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
976 when there are no lines.
977
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +0000978- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
979 which could occur with Tk 8.4
980
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000981- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
982 to child processes.
983
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +0000984- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
985
986- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
987
988- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
989 xmlrpclib.
990
991- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
992 responses.
993
994- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
995 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
996
997- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
998 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
999 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1000
1001- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1002 used as patterns.
1003
1004- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1005 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1006 than Tk 8.3.
1007
1008- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1009
1010- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001011
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001012Tools/Demos
1013-----------
1014
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001015- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1016
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001017- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1018
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001019- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001020
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001021Build
1022-----
1023
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001024- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1025
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001026- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1027
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001028- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1029 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001030
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001031- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1032 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1033 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001034
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001035C API
1036-----
1037
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001038- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1039 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1040
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001041Windows
1042-------
1043
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001044- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1045 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1046 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1047 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1048 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1049 Python exception ::
1050
1051 thread.error: can't start new thread
1052
1053 is raised now.
1054
1055- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1056 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1057 instead of from DLL teardown.
1058
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001059Mac
1060---
1061
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001062- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001063 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001064 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1065 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1066 the executable in the bundle.
1067
1068- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001069
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001070- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1071
1072- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1073 on Panther.
1074
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001075What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1076================================
1077
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001078*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001079
1080Core and builtins
1081-----------------
1082
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001083- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1084 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1085 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1086 with the -i option.
1087
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001088- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1089 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1090
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001091- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1092 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1093
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001094- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1095 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1096 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1097 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1098 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1099 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1100 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1101 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1102 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1103 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1104 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1105 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1106 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001107
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001108- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1109 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1110 embedded in a lambda expression.
1111
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001112- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1113 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1114 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1115 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1116 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1117
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001118- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1119 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1120 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1121
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001122- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1123 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1124
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001125- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1126 It's writable again.
1127
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001128- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1129 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1130 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001131 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001132
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001133- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1134 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1135 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1136
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001137Extension modules
1138-----------------
1139
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001140- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1141 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1142
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001143- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1144 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1145 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1146 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1147
1148- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1149 collection.
1150
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001151- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1152 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1153 unique within a single program run.
1154
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001155- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1156 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1157
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001158- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1159 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1160
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001161- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1162 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001163
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001164- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1165
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001166- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1167 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1168
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001169- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1170 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1171 for many BSD-derived systems.
1172
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001173
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001174Library
1175-------
1176
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001177- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1178 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1179 primary ones:
1180
1181 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1182 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1183 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1184
1185 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1186 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1187 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1188 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1189 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1190 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1191
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001192- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1193 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1194 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1195 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1196 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1197 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1198 argument.
1199
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001200- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1201 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1202 in the archive.
1203
1204- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1205 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1206
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001207- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1208 569574).
1209
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001210- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1211 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1212 no more.
1213
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001214- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1215 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1216 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1217 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1218 code coverage.
1219
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001220- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1221 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1222 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001223 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1224 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001225
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001226- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1227 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1228 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001229 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001230
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001231- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1232
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001233- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1234 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1235 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1236 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1237
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001238- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1239 handling.
1240
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001241- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1242 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1243
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001244- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1245 in socket.py.
1246
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001247- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1248
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001249- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1250 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1251 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1252 opener with proxy support.
1253
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001254- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1255
1256- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1257
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001258Tools/Demos
1259-----------
1260
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001261- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1262
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001263- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1264
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001265- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1266 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001267
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001268- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1269 files.
1270
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001271Build
1272-----
1273
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001274- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001275 different root directory.
1276
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001277C API
1278-----
1279
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001280- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1281 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1282 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1283 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1284 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1285 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1286 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1287 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1288 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1289 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1290
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001291- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1292 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1293 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1294 from Python.
1295
1296
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001297New platforms
1298-------------
1299
1300None this time.
1301
1302Tests
1303-----
1304
1305- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1306 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1307
1308Windows
1309-------
1310
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001311- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1312
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001313- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1314 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1315 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1316 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1317 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1318 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1319 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1320 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1321 that's what it's for.
1322
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001323Mac
1324---
1325
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001326- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1327 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1328 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1329 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001330- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1331 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1332- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001333
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001334SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1335------------------------------------
1336
1337430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1338598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1339622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1340661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1341683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1342697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1343713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1344724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1345727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1346729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1347730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1348731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1349732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1350733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1351735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1352740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1353744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1354745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1355747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1356749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1357751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1358753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1359755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1360757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1361760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1362
1363
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001364What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1365================================
1366
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001367*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001368
1369Core and builtins
1370-----------------
1371
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001372- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1373 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1374
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001375- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1376 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1377 and cannot be strings).
1378
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001379- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1380 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1381 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1382 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1383
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001384- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1385 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1386 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1387 Python itself.
1388
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001389- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1390 the referenced object, if it has one.
1391
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001392- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1393 the thread started at
1394 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1395
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001396- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1397 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1398 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1399 placed on a list index.
1400
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001401- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1402 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1403 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1404 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1405
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001406- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1407 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1408 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1409 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1410 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1411 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1412 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1413
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001414- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1415 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1416 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1417 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1418 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1419
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001420- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1421 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001422
1423- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1424 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1425 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1426 #693195.)
1427
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001428- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1429 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001430
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001431- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001432 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001433 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1434 interpreter executions, would fail.
1435
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001436- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001437 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001438 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001439
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001440Extension modules
1441-----------------
1442
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001443- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1444 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1445 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1446 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1447
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001448- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1449 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1450
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001451- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1452 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1453 and Greg Chapman.)
1454
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001455- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1456 recursively.
1457
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001458- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001459 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1460 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1461 leaks.
1462
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001463- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1464
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001465- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1466 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1467 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1468 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1469 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1470 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1471 #705836.
1472
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001473- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001474 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1475
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001476- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1477 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1478 See SF bug #692416.
1479
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001480- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1481 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1482
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001483- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1484 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1485 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001486
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001487- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001488 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1489 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1490
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001491- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1492 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1493 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1494 timeouts to work properly.
1495
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001496Library
1497-------
1498
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001499- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1500 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1501 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1502 future release.
1503
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001504- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1505 for querying platform dependent features.
1506
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001507- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001508
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001509- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1510 pickle protocol versions.
1511
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001512- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1513 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1514 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1515
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001516- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1517
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001518- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1519 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1520 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1521 modules.
1522
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001523- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1524 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1525 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1526
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001527- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1528 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1529
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001530- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1531 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1532 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1533
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001534- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001535 MS Office extensions.
1536
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001537- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1538 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1539
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001540- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1541 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1542
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001543- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1544 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1545 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1546 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1547 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1548 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1549
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001550- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1551 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1552 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001553
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001554- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1555 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1556 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1557
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001558- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1559
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001560- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1561 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1562 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1563
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001564Tools/Demos
1565-----------
1566
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001567- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1568 See the module docstring for details.
1569
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001570Build
1571-----
1572
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001573- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1574 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001575
1576C API
1577-----
1578
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001579- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1580
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001581- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1582 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1583 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1584
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001585- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1586 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001587
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001588 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1589 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1590 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001591
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001592- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001593 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1594
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001595- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1596 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1597 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001598
1599New platforms
1600-------------
1601
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001602None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001603
1604Tests
1605-----
1606
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001607- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1608 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001609
1610Windows
1611-------
1612
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001613- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1614 function.
1615
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001616- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1617 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001618
1619Mac
1620---
1621
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001622- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1623 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001624
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001625- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1626 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001627
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001628- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1629 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1630 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001631
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001632- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001633 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1634 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001635
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001636- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1637 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001638
1639
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001640What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1641=================================
1642
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001643*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001644
1645Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001646-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001647
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001648- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1649 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1650 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1651
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001652- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1653 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1654 (SF patch #664376.)
1655
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001656- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1657 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1658 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1659 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1660 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1661 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001662 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001663
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001664- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1665 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1666 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1667 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001668 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001669
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001670- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1671 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1672 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1673 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1674 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1675 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1676 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1677 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1678 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1679 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1680 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1681
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001682- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1683 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1684 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1685 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1686 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1687 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1688
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001689- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1690 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1691
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001692- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1693 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1694 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1695 case.)
1696
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001697- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1698 passed as unicode strings.
1699
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001700- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1701 See SF bug #683467.
1702
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001703- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1704 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1705
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001706- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1707
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001708- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1709
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001710- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1711 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1712 arguments.
1713
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001714- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1715 See SF bug #667147.
1716
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001717- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001718 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001719 See SF bug #676155.
1720
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001721- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001722 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001723 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1724 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1725 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1726 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1727 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1728 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001729
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001730Extension modules
1731-----------------
1732
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001733- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1734 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1735 tp_as_number pointer.
1736
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001737- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1738 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1739 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1740 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1741 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1742
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001743- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1744
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001745- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1746
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001747- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001748 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001749 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1750 patch #678531.)
1751
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001752- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1753 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1754
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001755- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1756 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1757
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001758- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1759
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001760- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1761 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1762 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1763
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001764- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1765
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001766- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1767 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1768
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001769- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001770
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001771- datetime changes:
1772
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001773 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1774
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001775 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1776 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1777 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1778 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1779 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1780 now.
1781
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001782 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001783 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1784 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001785
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001786 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001787 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001788 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1789 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1790 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1791 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001792
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001793 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1794 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1795 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001796 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1797
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001798 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1799 by a later example coded by Guido.
1800
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001801 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001802 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1803 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1804 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001805 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1806 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1807
1808 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1809 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1810 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1811 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1812 tzinfo subclass instance.
1813
1814 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1815 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1816 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1817 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1818 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1819 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1820 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1821 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001822
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001823 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1824 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1825 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1826 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1827 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001828 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1829
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001830 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001831
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001832 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1833 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1834 as a naive datetime object.
1835
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001836 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1837 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1838 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1839
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001840 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1841 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1842 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1843 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1844 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1845 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1846 comparison.
1847
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001848 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1849 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1850 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1851 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001852 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001853
1854 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001855
1856 and ::
1857
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001858 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1859
1860 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1861 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1862 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1863 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1864
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001865 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1866 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1867 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1868 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1869 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1870
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001871 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1872 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001873 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1874 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001875
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001876Library
1877-------
1878
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001879- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1880 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1881
1882- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1883 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1884 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1885 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1886 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1887 See PEP 307 for details.
1888
1889- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
1890 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
1891
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001892- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
1893 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001894 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001895 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
1896 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00001897 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00001898
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00001899- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
1900 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
1901
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001902- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
1903 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
1904 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
1905
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00001906- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
1907
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00001908- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
1909 exception.
1910
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00001911- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
1912 class.
1913
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00001914- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
1915 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
1916 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
1917
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00001918- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
1919 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
1920
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001921- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00001922 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
1923 See SF bug #659228.
1924
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00001925- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
1926 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
1927 See SF patch #651082.
1928
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00001929- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001930
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00001931- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
1932 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
1933
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001934- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00001935 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00001936
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00001937- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
1938 DOS paths from other platforms.
1939
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001940Tools/Demos
1941-----------
1942
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001943- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
1944 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
1945 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
1946 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
1947 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
1948 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
1949 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
1950 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
1951 example:
1952
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00001953 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
1954 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00001955
1956 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
1957
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00001958
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001959Build
1960-----
1961
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001962- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
1963 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
1964 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001965 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
1966
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00001967 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
1968
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00001969- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
1970 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
1971 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
1972 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
1973 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
1974 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
1975 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
1976 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
1977 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
1978
1979- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
1980 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
1981 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
1982 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
1983
1984- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
1985 from the Tools/scripts directory.
1986
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001987C API
1988-----
1989
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001990- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
1991 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00001992
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001993- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
1994 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1995 tp_as_number pointer.
1996
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00001997- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
1998 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
1999 (SF #681367)
2000
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002001- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2002 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2003 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2004 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002005
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002006Tests
2007-----
2008
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002009- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002010 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2011 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2012 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2013 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2014 pydoc.)
2015
2016- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2017
2018- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002019
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002020Windows
2021-------
2022
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002023- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2024 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2025 time).
2026
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002027- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2028 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2029
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002030- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2031 release without strong cryptography.
2032
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002033- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002034 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002035
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002036- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2037 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2038
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002039Mac
2040---
2041
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002042- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2043 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002044
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002045- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2046 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2047 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002048
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002049- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2050 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002051
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002052- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2053 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2054 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2055 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002056
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002057- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002058 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2059 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2060 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002061
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002062
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002063What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002064=================================
2065
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002066*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002067
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002068Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002069--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002070
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002071- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2072
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002073- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2074 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002075 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002076 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002077 a different meaning than before.
2078
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002079- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002080 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002081 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002082
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002083- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002084 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002085 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002086
2087- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2088 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2089 and deallocation.
2090
2091- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2092 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2093
2094- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2095 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2096 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2097 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2098 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2099
2100- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2101 now detected by the garbage collector.
2102
2103- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2104 [SF bug 519621]
2105
2106- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2107 identifier.
2108
2109- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2110 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2111 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2112 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2113 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2114 [SF bug 563060]
2115
2116- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2117 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2118 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2119 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2120 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2121
2122- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2123 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2124 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2125
2126- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2127
2128- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2129 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2130 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2131 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2132 state of the slots would be lost.)
2133
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002134Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002135-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002136
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002137- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002138 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2139 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2140 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2141 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002142 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2143 Jython 2.1.
2144
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002145- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002146 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002147 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2148 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2149 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2150 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2151 these, see PEP 302.
2152
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002153- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2154 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2155 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2156
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002157- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2158 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2159 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2160
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002161- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2162 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2163 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2164
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002165- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2166 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2167 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2168 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2169 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2170 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2171 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2172 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2173 releases or implementations.
2174
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002175- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002176 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2177 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002178
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002179- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2180 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2181
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002182- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2183 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2184 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2185
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002186- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2187 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2188
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002189- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2190 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002191 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2192 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002193
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002194- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2195 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2196 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2197 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2198 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2199
2200 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2201 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2202 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2203 pattern.
2204
2205 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2206 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2207 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2208 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2209
2210 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2211 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2212 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2213 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2214 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2215 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2216
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002217- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2218 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2219 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2220 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2221 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2222 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2223 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2224 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002225
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002226- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2227 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2228 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2229 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2230 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002231 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2232 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2233 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2234 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2235 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2236 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2237 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002238
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002239- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2240 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2241
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002242- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2243 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2244 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2245 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2246 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2247 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2248 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2249 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2250 to Zack Weinberg!
2251
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002252- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2253 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2254 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2255 type. This has been fixed now.
2256
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002257- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2258 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2259 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2260
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002261- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2262 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2263 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2264 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2265 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2266 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2267 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2268 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002269 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002270
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002271- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2272 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2273 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002274
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002275- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2276 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2277 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2278 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2279 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2280 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2281 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2282 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002283 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002284 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2285 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2286
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002287- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2288 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2289 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2290 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2291 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2292 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2293 this.)
2294
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002295- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2296 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002297 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002298 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002299 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2300 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002301 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2302 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002303
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002304- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2305 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2306 currently running.
2307
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002308- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2309 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2310 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2311 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2312
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002313- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2314 as directory names.
2315
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002316- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2317 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2318
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002319- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2320 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2321
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002322- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002323 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2324 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002325
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002326- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2327 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2328 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2329 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2330 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2331
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002332- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2333 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2334 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2335 removed.
2336
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002337- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2338 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2339 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2340
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002341- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2342 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2343 to __debug__.
2344
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002345- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2346 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2347 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2348
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002349- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2350 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2351 deprecated now.
2352
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002353- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2354 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2355 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002356
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002357- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2358 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2359 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2360 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2361 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002362
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002363- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2364 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2365
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002366- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2367 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2368 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002369 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002370 is backward compatible.
2371
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002372- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2373 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2374 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2375 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2376 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2377
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002378- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2379 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2380 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2381 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2382 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2383 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002384
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002385- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2386 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2387
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002388- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2389 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2390
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002391- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2392 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2393 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2394 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2395 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2396
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002397- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2398 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2399 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2400
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002401- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002402 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2403
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002404- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2405 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2406 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002407
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002408- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2409 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2410
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002411- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2412 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2413 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2414
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002415- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2416
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002417Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002418-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002419
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002420- Added three operators to the operator module:
2421 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2422 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2423 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2424
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002425- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2426
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002427- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2428 archives.
2429
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002430- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2431 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2432 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2433
2434 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2435
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002436- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2437 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2438 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002439 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002440
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002441- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2442 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2443 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2444 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002445 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2446 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2447 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2448 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002449
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002450- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2451 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002452
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002453- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2454
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002455- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2456 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2457
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002458- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2459 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2460 supported.
2461
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002462- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2463
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002464- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2465 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002466
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002467- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2468 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2469
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002470- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2471
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002472- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2473 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2474
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002475- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2476 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2477 functions but callable type objects.
2478
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002479- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002480 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002481 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002482
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002483- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2484 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002485
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002486- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2487 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002488
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002489- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2490 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2491 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2492 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2493
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002494- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2495 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002496
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002497- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2498 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2499 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2500 and __imul__.
2501
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002502- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002503 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2504 is called.
2505
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002506- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2507 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2508 interpreter was compiled.
2509
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002510- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2511 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2512 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002513 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002514 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2515 1, not 2.
2516
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002517- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2518 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2519 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2520 limit.
2521
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002522- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2523 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2524 bug #623464.
2525
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002526- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2527 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2528 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2529 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2530
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002531Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002532-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002533
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002534- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2535
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002536- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2537 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2538 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2539 with Python 2.3a2.
2540
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002541- os.path exposes getctime.
2542
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002543- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002544 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002545 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002546 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002547 unit tests of floating point results.
2548
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002549- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2550 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2551 has been increased.
2552
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002553- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2554 executed.
2555
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002556- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2557 postinstallation script.
2558
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002559- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2560 test the current module.
2561
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002562- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002563 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2564 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2565 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2566 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2567
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002568- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002569 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002570 Ward's Optik package.
2571
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002572- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2573 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2574 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2575 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2576
2577- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2578 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002579 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002580
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002581- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2582 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2583 shelf are binary pickles.
2584
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002585- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2586 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2587
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002588- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2589 modules are iterators now.
2590
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002591- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2592 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2593 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2594 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2595 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2596 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002597
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002598- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2599 with their entity value.
2600
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002601- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2602
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002603- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2604 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002605
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002606- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2607 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002608 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002609
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002610- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2611 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2612 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2613 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2614 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2615 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2616 main():
2617
2618 import locale
2619 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2620
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002621- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2622 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2623
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002624- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2625 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2626 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2627 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2628 to the new standard.
2629
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002630- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2631 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2632 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2633 an extension to the database.
2634
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002635- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2636 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2637 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2638 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002639 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002640
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002641- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002642 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002643
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002644- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2645 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2646 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2647 bounded integers.
2648
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002649- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2650 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2651 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2652 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2653 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2654 in existence.
2655
2656 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2657 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2658 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2659 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2660 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2661 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2662
2663 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2664 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2665 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2666 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2667
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002668- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2669 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2670 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2671
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002672- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2673
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002674- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2675 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2676 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2677 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2678
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002679- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2680 argument.
2681
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002682- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2683 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2684 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2685 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2686 [SF patch 560794].
2687
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002688- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2689 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2690 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002691 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2692 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2693 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002694
2695- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2696 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002697
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002698- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2699 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2700 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2701 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002702
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002703- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2704 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2705 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2706 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2707 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2708
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002709- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002710
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002711- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2712
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002713- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2714 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2715 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2716 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2717 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2718 identical to None.
2719
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002720- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2721 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2722 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2723 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2724 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2725 results now.
2726
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002727- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2728 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2729
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002730- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2731 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2732 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2733 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2734 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2735 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2736 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2737 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2738
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002739- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2740
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002741- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2742 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2743
2744- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2745 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2746 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2747 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2748 and other systems.
2749
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002750- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2751 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2752 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2753 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 +00002754 work well with these.
2755
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002756- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2757
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002758- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002759 connections.
2760
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002761- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2762 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2763 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2764
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002765- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2766 sets
2767
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002768- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2769 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2770 name.
2771
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002772- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2773 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2774 passed in.
2775
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002776- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002777 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002778 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2779 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002780
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002781- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2782
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002783- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2784
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002785- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2786 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2787 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2788
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002789- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2790 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2791 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2792 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002793 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002794
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002795- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002796 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002797 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002798
2799- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2800 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2801 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2802
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002803- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002804 the value of its expression argument.
2805
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002806- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2807 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2808 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2809
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002810- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2811 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2812 skipstone browser was included.
2813
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002814- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2815 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2816
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002817Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002818-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002819
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002820- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2821 names in addition to accepting file names.
2822
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002823- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2824 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2825 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2826 still used and useful.)
2827
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002828- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2829 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2830 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2831 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002832
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002833- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2834 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2835 the generated binary.
2836
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002837Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002838-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002839
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002840- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2841
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002842- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2843 except in the hands of experts.
2844
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002845- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002846 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2847 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2848 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002849
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002850- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2851 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2852 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2853 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2854 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2855 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2856 builds.
2857
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002858- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2859 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2860 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2861 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2862 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2863 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2864 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2865 new type.
2866
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002867- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002868
2869 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2870 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2871 positive infinities.
2872
2873 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2874 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2875 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2876 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2877 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2878 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2879 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2880
2881 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2882
2883 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2884
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002885- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2886 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2887 size of the executable.
2888
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002889- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
2890 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
2891 configure script. On other platforms, remove
2892 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00002893
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00002894- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
2895
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00002896- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
2897 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
2898 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00002899
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00002900- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
2901 well as Unix.
2902
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00002903- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
2904 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
2905 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
2906 modules in the README file for details.
2907
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002908C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002909-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002910
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002911- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
2912 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002913 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00002914 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00002915 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00002916
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002917- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
2918 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
2919 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
2920 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
2921 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
2922 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002923 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002924 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
2925 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
2926 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
2927 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
2928 aligned.)
2929
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00002930- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
2931 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
2932 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
2933
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002934- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
2935 level.
2936
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00002937- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
2938 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
2939 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
2940 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
2941 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
2942
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00002943- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
2944 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
2945 code.
2946
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00002947- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
2948 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
2949 adjusting for negative indices.
2950
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002951- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
2952 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
2953 object.
2954
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00002955- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
2956 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
2957 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
2958
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002959- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
2960 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00002961
2962- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
2963
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00002964- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
2965 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
2966 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
2967 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
2968
2969- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
2970
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00002971- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002972
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002973- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00002974 without going through the buffer API.
2975
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002976- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00002977
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00002978- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
2979 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
2980 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
2981 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
2982
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002983- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
2984 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
2985
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00002986- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002987 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
2988
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002989New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002990-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002991
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00002992- OpenVMS is now supported.
2993
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00002994- AtheOS is now supported.
2995
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00002996- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
2997
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00002998- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
2999
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003000Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003001-----
3002
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003003- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3004 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3005 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003006
3007Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003008-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003009
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003010- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3011 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3012 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3013 bugs.
3014 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003015 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003016 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3017 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003018 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003019
3020- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003021 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003022
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003023- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3024 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3025
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003026- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3027 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003028 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003029 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3030
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003031- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3032 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3033 use files" uninstall option).
3034
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003035- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3036
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003037- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3038 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3039
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003040- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3041 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3042 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3043
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003044- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3045 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3046 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3047 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3048 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003049 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3050 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3051 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003052
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003053- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003054 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003055 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3056 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3057 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3058 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3059 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3060 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3061 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3062 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3063 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3064 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3065 work around.
3066
3067- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3068 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3069 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3070 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3071 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3072 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3073 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3074 specified with O_CREAT too).
3075
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003076Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003077----
3078
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003079- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003080
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003081- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3082 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3083 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3084
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003085- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3086 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3087 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3088
3089- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3090 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3091 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3092 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3093 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3094 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3095 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3096 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003097
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003098- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3099 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3100 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003101
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003102- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3103 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3104 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3105 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3106 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003107
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003108- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3109 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3110 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003111
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003112- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3113 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003114
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003115- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3116 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3117 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3118 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3119 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003120
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003121- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3122 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3123 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3124
3125- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3126 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3127 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003128
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003129- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3130 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3131 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3132 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003133 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003134
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003135- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3136 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003137
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003138- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3139 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003140
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003141- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003142 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003143 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3144 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003145
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003146
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003147What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003148===============================
3149
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003150*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3151
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003152Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003153--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003154
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003155- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3156 with a custom metaclass.
3157
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003158Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003159-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003160
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003161- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3162 are proxies.
3163
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003164Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003165-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003166
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003167- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3168 very short strings.
3169
3170- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3171 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3172 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3173 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3174 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3175
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003176Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003177-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003178
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003179- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3180 close or delete time).
3181
3182- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3183 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3184
3185- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3186
3187- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003188 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003189
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003190Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003191-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003192
3193Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003194-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003195
3196C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003197-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003198
3199New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003200-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003201
3202Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003203-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003204
3205Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003206-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003207
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003208- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3209
3210- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3211 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3212
3213- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3214 deleted at process exit time.
3215
3216- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3217 in backslash.
3218
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003219Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003220----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003221
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003222- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3223 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3224 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3225
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003226
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003227What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003228===========================
3229
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003230*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3231
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003232Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003233--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003234
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003235- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3236 been extensively updated. See
3237
3238 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3239
3240 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3241
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003242- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3243 deleted!
3244
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003245- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3246 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3247 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3248 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3249 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3250
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003251- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3252
3253 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3254 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3255
3256 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3257 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3258 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3259 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3260 supported anyway.
3261
3262 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3263 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3264
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003265- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3266 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3267 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3268 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3269 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003270
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003271- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3272 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3273 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3274
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003275Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003276-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003277
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003278- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3279 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3280 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3281 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3282 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3283 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003284 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3285 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3286 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3287 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003288
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003289- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3290 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3291 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3292
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003293Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003294-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003295
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003296- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3297
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003298Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003299-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003300
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003301- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3302 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3303 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3304 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3305 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3306 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3307
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003308- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3309
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003310- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3311
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003312- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3313
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003314- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3315 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3316 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3317
3318- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3319
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003320Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003321-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003322
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003323- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3324 off a search on Google.
3325
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003326Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003327-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003328
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003329- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3330 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3331 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3332 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3333 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3334 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3335 other platforms should do likewise.
3336
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003337- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3338 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3339 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3340
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003341C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003342-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003343
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003344- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3345 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3346 producing key-value pairs.
3347
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003348- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003349 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003350 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3351 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3352 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3353 previously went unchallenged.
3354
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003355New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003356-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003357
3358Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003359-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003360
3361Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003362-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003363
3364Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003365----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003366
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003367- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3368 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003369
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003370- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3371 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3372 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3373 home.
3374
3375
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003376What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003377===========================
3378
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003379*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3380
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003381Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003382--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003383
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003384- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3385 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003386
3387 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003388 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003389
3390 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3391 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003392 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003393 This needs to be documented.
3394
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003395- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3396 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3397
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003398- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3399 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3400 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3401
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003402- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3403 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3404
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003405- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3406 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3407 class forbids it).
3408
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003409- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3410 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3411 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3412
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003413- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3414
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003415Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003416-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003417
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003418- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3419 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003420 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003421
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003422- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3423 (like 1 + '').
3424
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003425Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003426-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003427
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003428- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3429 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3430 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3431 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003432 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003433 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3434
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003435- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3436 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3437 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3438 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3439
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003440- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3441 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003442 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3443 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3444 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003445
3446- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3447 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003448
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003449- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3450 bytes on its input.
3451
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003452Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003453-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003454
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003455- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003456 convenience function.
3457
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003458- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3459 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3460 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003461 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3462 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3463 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3464 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3465 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3466 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003467
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003468- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3469 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3470 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3471 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3472
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003473- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3474 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3475 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3476
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003477- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3478 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3479 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3480 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3481
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003482- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3483 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003484 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003485 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3486 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3487 new -l and -e options.
3488
3489- statcache is now deprecated.
3490
3491- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3492 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003493 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003494 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3495 time properly taken into account.
3496
3497- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3498 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3499 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3500 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3501
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003502Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003503-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003504
3505Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003506-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003507
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003508- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3509 is built with libdb3 if available.
3510
3511- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3512
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003513C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003514-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003515
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003516- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3517 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3518 PySequence_Size().
3519
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003520- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3521
3522- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3523 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3524 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3525
3526- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3527 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3528
3529- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3530 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3531
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003532New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003533-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003534
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003535- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3536 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3537
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003538- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3539 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3540
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003541- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3542
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003543Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003544-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003545
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003546- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3547 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3548
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003549Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003550-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003551
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003552Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003553----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003554
3555- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3556 removed completely in the next release.
3557
3558- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3559 OSX.
3560
3561- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3562 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3563
3564- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3565
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003566
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003567What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003568===========================
3569
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003570*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3571
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003572Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003573--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003574
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003575- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003576 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003577 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003578 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3579 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003580 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3581 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003582 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3583 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003584
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003585- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3586 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3587
3588- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3589 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3590
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003591Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003592-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003593
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003594- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3595 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3596 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3597 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3598 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3599 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3600 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3601 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3602
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003603- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3604 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3605 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3606 example).
3607
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003608- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003609 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003610 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003611 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003612
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003613- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3614 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3615 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003616 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003617
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003618- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3619 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3620 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3621 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3622 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3623 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3624
3625 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3626
3627 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3628
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003629Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003630-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003631
3632- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3633
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003634- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3635
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003636- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3637 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003638
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003639- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3640 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3641 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3642 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3643 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3644 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003645 attributes.
3646
3647- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3648 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3649 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003650
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003651- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3652 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3653 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003654
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003655- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3656 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3657 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003658 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3659 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3660
3661- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3662 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003663
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003664Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003665-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003666
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003667- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3668 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3669
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003670- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3671 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3672 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3673 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3674
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003675- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3676 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3677 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3678 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3679
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003680 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3681 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3682 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3683 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3684 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3685 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3686 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3687 without losing information).
3688
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003689- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003690 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3691 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3692 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3693 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3694 module).
3695
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003696 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003697 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3698 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3699 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3700 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003701
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003702- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003703 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3704 encoding.
3705
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003706- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3707 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3708
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003709- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003710 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3711
3712- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3713 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3714 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3715 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3716
3717- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3718
3719- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3720 ON, and OFF.
3721
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003722- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3723 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3724
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003725Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003726-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003727
3728- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3729 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3730 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003731
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003732- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3733 been added: -X and -E.
3734
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003735Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003736-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003737
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003738- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3739 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3740
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003741C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003742-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003743
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003744- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3745 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3746 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3747 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3748 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3749
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003750- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3751 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3752 as long) arguments.
3753
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003754- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3755 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3756 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3757 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3758 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3759 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3760
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003761- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3762 input.
3763
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003764New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003765-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003766
3767Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003768-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003769
3770Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003771-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003772
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003773- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3774 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3775 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3776
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003777- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3778 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3779 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003780 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003781
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003782 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3783 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3784 import signal
3785 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003786
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003787 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003788 while 1:
3789 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003790 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003791 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3792 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3793 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3794 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003795
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003796
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003797What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3798===========================
3799
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003800*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3801
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003802Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003803--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003804
3805- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3806 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3807 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3808
3809- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3810 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3811 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3812 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3813 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3814 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3815 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003816
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003817- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003818 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003819 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3820 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3821 associate a docstring with a property.
3822
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003823- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3824 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3825 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3826 other built-in object types.
3827
3828- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3829 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3830 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3831 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3832 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3833
3834- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3835 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3836
3837- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3838 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003839 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003840 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3841 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3842 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3843 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3844 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3845
3846- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3847 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3848 class.
3849
3850- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3851 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3852 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3853 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3854
3855- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3856 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3857 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3858 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3859
3860- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3861 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3862
3863- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3864 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3865 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3866 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3867 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003868 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003869 with the same value as s.
3870
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003871- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3872
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003873Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003874----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003875
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003876- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3877
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003878- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3879 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3880 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3881 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3882 objects.
3883
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003884- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3885 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003886 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3887 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3888
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003889- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
3890 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
3891 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
3892
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003893Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003894-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003895
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00003896- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3897 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
3898 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
3899 by the instances.
3900
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00003901- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
3902 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
3903 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
3904
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003905- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
3906 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
3907 before the entire comparison is complete.
3908
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00003909- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
3910 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
3911 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
3912
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00003913- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
3914 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
3915 getwriter().
3916
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003917- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
3918 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
3919
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00003920- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003921 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
3922 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
3923
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00003924- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
3925 iterable object.
3926
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003927- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
3928 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003929
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003930- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
3931 authentication.
3932
3933- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
3934 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00003935
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003936- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00003937 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
3938 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
3939 a sample driver.)
3940
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003941Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003942-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003943
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003944- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
3945 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
3946 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
3947 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
3948 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
3949 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
3950 kernel has large file support.
3951
3952- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
3953 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
3954 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
3955 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
3956 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
3957
3958- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
3959 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
3960 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
3961
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003962C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003963-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003964
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003965- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
3966 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
3967
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003968New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003969-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003970
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003971- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
3972 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
3973
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003974Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003975-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003976
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003977- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
3978 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
3979 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
3980 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
3981 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
3982
3983- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
3984 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
3985 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
3986 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
3987
3988- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
3989 especially in regard to reporting errors.
3990
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003991Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003992-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003993
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003994- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00003995 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
3996 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00003997
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003998
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00003999What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4000===========================
4001
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004002*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4003
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004004Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004005----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004006
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004007- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4008 big to represent as a C double.
4009
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004010- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4011 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4012 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4013 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4014 restriction).
4015
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004016- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4017 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4018 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4019 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4020 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4021
4022 >>> dir([])
4023 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4024 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4025 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4026 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4027 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4028 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4029 'reverse', 'sort']
4030
4031 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4032
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004033- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004034 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4035 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4036 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4037 OverflowError exception.
4038
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004039- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004040 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004041 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4042 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4043 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4044 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4045 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004046 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004047 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4048 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4049
4050 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4051 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4052 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4053 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004054
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004055- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004056 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4057 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4058 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4059 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4060 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4061 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4062 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4063 once it is created.
4064
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004065- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4066 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4067 (key, value) pairs.
4068
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004069- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004070 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4071 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4072
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004073- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4074 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4075 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4076 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4077 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004078
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004079- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004080 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4081 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4082
4083 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4084
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004085- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004086 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4087
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004088Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004089-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004090
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004091- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004092 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4093 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004094
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004095- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4096 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4097 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4098 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4099 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4100 in this area anymore).
4101
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004102- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4103 threading.Timer.
4104
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004105- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4106 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4107
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004108- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004109 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4110
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004111- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004112 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4113 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4114 converted to Python longs.
4115
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004116- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004117 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4118
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004119- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4120 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4121 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4122
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004123Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004124-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004125
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004126- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4127 division operators as per PEP 238.
4128
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004129Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004130-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004131
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004132- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4133 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4134 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4135 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4136
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004137C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004138-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004139
4140- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004141
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004142- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4143 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004144 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004145
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004146 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4147 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004148 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004149 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004150
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004151- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004152 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4153 module:
4154
4155 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004156
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004157 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4158 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004159
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004160 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4161 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004162
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004163 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4164
4165 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4166
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004167- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004168 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4169 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4170 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004171
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004172New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004173-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004174
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004175- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4176 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4177 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4178 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4179 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004180
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004181Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004182-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004183
4184Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004185-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004186
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004187- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4188 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4189 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4190 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004191 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4192 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4193 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4194 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4195 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004196
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004197- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004198 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4199
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004200
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004201What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4202===========================
4203
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004204*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4205
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004206Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004207-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004208
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004209- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4210 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4211
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004212- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4213 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4214 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004215
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004216- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4217 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4218 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4219 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004220
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004221- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4222
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004223- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004224
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004225Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004226-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004227
4228- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004229 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004230 the module docstring for details.
4231
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004232Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004233-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004234
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004235- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004236 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4237 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4238 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004239
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004240- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4241 Nick Mathewson.
4242
4243Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004244----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004245
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004246- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4247 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4248 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4249 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4250 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4251 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4252 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4253 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4254
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004255- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4256 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4257 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4258 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4259
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004260- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4261 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4262 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4263 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4264 come a long way).
4265
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004266- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4267 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4268 write filters for these warnings).
4269
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004270- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4271 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4272 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4273 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4274 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4275
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004276- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4277 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4278 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4279 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4280 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4281 older distribution.
4282
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004283Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004284-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004285
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004286- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4287 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004288 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004289
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004290- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4291 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4292 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4293
4294- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4295
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004296- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4297
4298- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4299
4300- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4301
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004302- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004303
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004304- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4305
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004306New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004307-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004308
4309C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004310-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004311
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004312- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4313 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4314 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4315 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4316 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4317 against buffer overruns.
4318
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004319- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004320 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4321 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004322 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4323 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4324 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4325
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004326- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4327 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4328 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4329 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4330 deprecated.
4331
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004332Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004333-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004334
4335- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4336 relevant is found.
4337
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004338
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004339What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004340===========================
4341
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004342*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4343
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004344Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004345----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004346
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004347- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4348 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4349 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4350 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4351 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4352 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4353 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4354 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004355 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004356 repaired.
4357
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004358- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004359 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004360 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4361 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4362 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4363 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4364 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4365 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4366 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4367 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4368
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004369- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4370 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4371 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4372 leading BMO character).
4373
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004374- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4375 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4376 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4377
4378 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4379 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4380 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004381
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004382 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4383 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4384 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4385 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4386 for various simple to use conversions.
4387
4388 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4389 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4390
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004391 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4392 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4393 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4394 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4395 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4396 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4397 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4398 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4399 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4400 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4401 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4402 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4403 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4404 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4405 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004406
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004407- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4408 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4409 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004410 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004411 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004412
4413 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004414 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4415 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4416 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4417 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4418 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004419 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4420 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004421
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004422 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4423 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4424 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004425 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004426
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004427- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4428 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4429 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4430 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4431 floating arithmetic,
4432
4433 x = 9007199254740992.0
4434 print long(x)
4435
4436 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4437 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4438 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4439 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4440 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4441 functions are of good quality).
4442
4443 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4444 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4445 algorithms to break.
4446
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004447- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4448 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4449 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4450 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4451 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4452 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4453 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4454 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4455 order.
4456
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004457- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4458 operation along the most common code paths.
4459
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004460- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4461 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4462
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004463- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4464 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4465 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4466 {}.update(UserDict())
4467
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004468- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4469 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4470 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4471 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4472 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4473 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4474 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4475 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4476
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004477- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004478 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004479
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004480 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004481 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4482 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004483 join() method of strings
4484 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004485 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4486 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004487 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004488 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004489
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004490- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4491 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4492
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004493- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4494 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4495
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004496- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4497 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4498 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4499 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4500
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004501- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4502 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004503 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004504 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4505 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004506
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004507- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4508
4509
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004510Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004511-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004512
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004513- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004514 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004515 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4516 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4517
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004518- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4519 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4520
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004521- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4522 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4523 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4524 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4525
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004526- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4527 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4528 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4529
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004530- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4531
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004532- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4533
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004534- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4535 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4536 that are still imported into string.py).
4537
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004538- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4539
4540- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4541 Now it does.
4542
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004543- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4544
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004545- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4546 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4547 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4548 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4549 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004550 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4551 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004552
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004553- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4554 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4555 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4556 'help(object)'.
4557
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004558Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004559-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004560
4561- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004562 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004563 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4564 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4565
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004566- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004567 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4568 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004569
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004570C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004571-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004572
4573- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4574 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004575
4576----
4577
4578**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**