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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
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +000015- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
16 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
17 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
18 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
19 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
20 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
21 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
22 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
23 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
24 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
25 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
26
27 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
28 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
29 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
30 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
31 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
32 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
33 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
34
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +000035- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
36 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
37
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000038- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000039 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000040
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000041- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000042 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000043 which was missing for no apparent reason.
44
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000045- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000046 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
47 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
48
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000049- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
50 types that support garbage collection.
51
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000052- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
53
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000054- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
55 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
56 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
57 Jython.
58
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +000059- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
60
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000061Extension modules
62-----------------
63
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +000064- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
65
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000066Library
67-------
68
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +000069- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
70
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +000071- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
72 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
73 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
74
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +000075- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
76
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +000077- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
78 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
79
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +000080- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
81 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
82 when dummy_threading is being used.
83
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +000084- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
85 from a tarfile.
86
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000087- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +000088 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000089
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +000090- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
91 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
92 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
93 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
94
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +000095- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
96 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
97
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +000098- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
99 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
100 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
101 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
102 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
103 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
104 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
105 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
106 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
107 by some other method in progress).
108
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000109- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
110 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
111 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000112
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000113- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
114
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000115- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
116 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
117 AM Kuchling.
118
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000119- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
120 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
121 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
122
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000123- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
124 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
125 instead of unsigned.
126
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000127- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000128 no longer part of the public API.
129
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000130- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
131 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
132 string methods of the same name).
133
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000134- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
135 SF patch 982681.
136
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000137- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000138 SF patch 945642.
139
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000140- doctest unittest integration improvements:
141
142 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
143
144 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
145 DocTestSuites.
146
147- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
148 that provide thread-local data.
149
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000150- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
151 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
152
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000153- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
154
155- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
156 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
157 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
158
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000159- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
160
161 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
162 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
163 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000164
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000165 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
166 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
167 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
168 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
169
170 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
171 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
172
173 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
174 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
175 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
176 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
177
178 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
179 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
180 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
181 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
182 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
183
184 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
185 wrapping help output.
186
187 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
188 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
189 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000190
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000191Tools/Demos
192-----------
193
194Build
195-----
196
197C API
198-----
199
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000200- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
201 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
202 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
203 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
204 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
205 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
206 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
207 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
208 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
209 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
210 its visible semantics have not changed.
211
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000212- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
213 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
214
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000215Documentation
216-------------
217
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000218- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000219
220 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
221 assigning thier values
222
223 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
224
225 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
226
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000227- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000228
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000229New platforms
230-------------
231
232Tests
233-----
234
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000235- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000236 platforms that use the Makefile.
237
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000238- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
239 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
240 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
241
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000242Windows
243-------
244
245Mac
246---
247
248
249
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000250What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
251=================================
252
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000253*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000254
255Core and builtins
256-----------------
257
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000258- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
259 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
260 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
261 objects now (one object instead of three).
262
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000263- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
264 Windows DLLs.
265
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000266- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval() now accepts any mapping type.
267
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000268- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
269 a new .pyc magic.
270
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000271- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
272 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
273 be there.
274
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000275- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
276 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
277 the LC_NUMERIC category.
278
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000279- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
280 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
281 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
282
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000283- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
284
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000285- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
286 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
287 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000288
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000289- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
290 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
291
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000292- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
293
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000294- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000295 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000296
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000297- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
298
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000299- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
300
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000301- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
302 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
303
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000304- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
305 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
306 Fixes bug #858016 .
307
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000308- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
309 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
310 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
311
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000312- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
313 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
314 improves their performance (about 35%).
315
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000316- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
317 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
318 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
319
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000320- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
321 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
322 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
323 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
324
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000325- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
326 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
327 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
328 length is not known).
329
330- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
331 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000332 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
333 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000334 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
335
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000336- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
337 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
338
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000339- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
340 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
341 keyword arguments.
342
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000343- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
344 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
345 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
346
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000347- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
348 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
349 cases.
350
351- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
352 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
353 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
354 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
355 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
356 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
357 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
358 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
359 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
360 a release build.
361
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000362- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
363 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
364
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000365- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000366 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000367
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000368- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
369 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
370 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
371 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
372 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
373 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
374 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
375 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
376 destroyed.
377
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000378- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
379 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
380 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
381 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
382 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
383 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
384 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
385 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
386
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000387- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
388 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
389 character other than a space.
390
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000391- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
392 by the function object or by the method object, the function
393 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
394 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
395 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
396 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
397 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
398 attributes with the same name.
399
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000400- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
401 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
402 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
403 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
404 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
405 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
406 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
407 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
408 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
409 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
410 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
411 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
412 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
413 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000414
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000415- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
416 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
417 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
418 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
419 This has been repaired.
420
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000421- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
422
423- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
424
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000425- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
426 over a sequence.
427
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000428- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000429 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000430
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000431- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
432
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000433- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
434 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
435 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
436 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
437 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
438 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
439 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
440 records with equal keys is unchanged).
441
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000442- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
443 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
444 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
445
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000446- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
447 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
448 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
449 freelist.
450
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000451- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
452 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
453
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000454- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
455 number.
456
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000457- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
458 a TypeError exception.
459
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000460- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
461 820195.
462
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000463- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
464 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
465 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
466
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000467- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000468 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
469 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000470
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000471- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
472 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
473 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
474
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000475- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
476 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000477 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000478
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000479- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000480 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
481 the first call.
482
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000483
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000484Extension modules
485-----------------
486
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000487- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
488 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
489
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000490- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
491 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
492 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
493 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
494 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
495 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
496 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000497
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000498- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
499
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000500- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
501
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000502- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
503 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
504
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000505- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
506 fewer false positives.
507
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000508- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
509 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
510
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000511- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000512 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
513
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000514- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000515 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000516 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
517 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
518 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000519
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000520- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
521 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
522 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
523 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
524
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000525- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
526 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
527 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
528 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
529 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
530 #897625.
531
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000532- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
533 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
534
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000535- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
536 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
537 and pops on either side of the deque.
538
539- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
540 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
541
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000542- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
543 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
544 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
545 other functions that expect a function argument.
546
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000547- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
548
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000549- os.getsid was added.
550
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000551- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
552 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
553 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
554
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000555- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
556
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000557- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
558
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000559- readline.clear_history was added.
560
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000561- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
562
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000563- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
564
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000565- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
566
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000567- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
568
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000569- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
570
571- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
572
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000573- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
574
575- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
576
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000577- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
578 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
579 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
580
581- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
582 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
583 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
584 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
585 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
586 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
587 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
588
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000589- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
590 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
591 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
592 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000593
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000594- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000595 iterators from a single iterable.
596
597- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
598 of raising a TypeError exception.
599
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000600- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
601 as parameter.
602
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000603Library
604-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000605
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000606- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
607 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
608 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000609
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000610- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
611 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
612 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000613
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000614- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000615
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000616- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
617 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000618
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000619- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
620 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
621
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000622- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
623
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000624- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000625 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000626
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000627- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
628 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
629
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000630- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
631
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000632- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
633 on cygwin and mingw32.
634
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000635- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
636
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000637- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
638 module.
639
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000640- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
641 installation scheme for all platforms.
642
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000643- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000644 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000645
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000646- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
647 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
648 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
649
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000650- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
651 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
652 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
653
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000654- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
655
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000656- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
657
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000658- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
659 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
660
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000661- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
662 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
663 type pattern with the same value exists.
664
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000665- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
666 when run from the command prompt).
667
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000668- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
669 not taken into consideration when caching value.
670
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000671- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
672 default sort).
673
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000674- Added global runctx function to profile module
675
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000676- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
677
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000678- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
679
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000680- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
681
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000682- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000683 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
684 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
685 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
686 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
687 accordingly.
688
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000689- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
690 decoding standards.
691
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000692- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
693 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
694 called for all requests.
695
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000696- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
697 they are passed to the compiler.
698
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000699- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
700 indent, width and depth.
701
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000702- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
703 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
704
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000705- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
706 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
707
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000708- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
709
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000710- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
711
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000712- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
713
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000714- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
715 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
716
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000717- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000718 for better performance.
719
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000720- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000721
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000722- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
723 a string).
724
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000725- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
726
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000727- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
728
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000729- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
730
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000731- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
732
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000733- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
734 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
735 list of fieldnames.
736
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000737- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
738 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
739
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000740- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
741
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000742- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
743 empty lists.
744
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000745- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
746 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
747 and shelves.
748
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000749- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
750 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
751
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000752- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000753 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
754 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000755
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000756- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
757 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000758 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000759
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000760- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000761 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
762 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
763
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000764- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
765 and removed in Py2.4.
766
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000767- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
768
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000769- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
770
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000771Tools/Demos
772-----------
773
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000774- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
775 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
776
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000777- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
778
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000779- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
780 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
781 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
782 destination in situations where both files are given.
783
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000784- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
785 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
786 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
787 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
788
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000789- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
790
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000791- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
792 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
793 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
794 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
795 now.
796
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000797- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
798 in effect
799
800- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
801 C-c C-h
802
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000803- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
804 -d option was given.
805
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000806Build
807-----
808
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000809- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
810 build under OS X.
811
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000812- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
813 --enable-profiling.
814
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000815- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
816 is configured --with-tsc.
817
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000818- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
819 on AMD64.
820
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000821- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
822 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
823
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000824- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
825 removed.
826
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000827- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
828 supported (see PEP 11).
829
830- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
831
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000832- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
833
834- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
835 (see PEP 11).
836
837- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
838 sizeof(char) must be 1.
839
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000840C API
841-----
842
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000843- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
844 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
845 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
846
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000847- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
848 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
849 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
850 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
851
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000852- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
853 generator objects.
854
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000855- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
856 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000857 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
858 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000859
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000860- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
861 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
862
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000863- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
864 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
865 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
866 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
867 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
868
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000869- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
870 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
871 about 10% faster.
872
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000873- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
874 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
875
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000876- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
877 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
878 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
879 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
880
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000881Windows
882-------
883
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000884- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
885 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
886 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
887 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
888
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000889- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
890 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
891 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
892
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000893
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000894What's New in Python 2.3 final?
895===============================
896
897*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
898
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000899IDLE
900----
901
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000902- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
903 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
904 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
905 context-menu actions.
906
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000907- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
908 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
909 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
910 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
911 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
912 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
913 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
914 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
915 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
916
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000917
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000918What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
919=============================================
920
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000921*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000922
923Core and builtins
924-----------------
925
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000926- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000927 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000928 comment at the end are still unsupported.
929
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000930Extension modules
931-----------------
932
933- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
934 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
935 than once. This has been fixed.
936
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000937- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
938 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
939 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
940 call.
941
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000942- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
943
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000944Library
945-------
946
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000947- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
948 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
949
950- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
951 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
952 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
953 restored.
954
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000955IDLE
956----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000957
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000958- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000959
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000960Build
961-----
962
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000963- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
964 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
965
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000966C API
967-----
968
969Windows
970-------
971
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000972- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
973 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
974
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000975- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
976
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000977Mac
978---
979
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000980- Various fixes to pimp.
981
982- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
983
984- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
985 more problems than it solves.
986
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000987
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000988What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
989=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000990
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +0000991*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
992
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +0000993Core and builtins
994-----------------
995
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +0000996- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
997 by sys.setcheckinterval().
998
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +0000999- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1000 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001001 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001002
1003- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1004 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1005 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001006 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001007
1008- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1009 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001010
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001011- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1012 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1013 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1014
1015- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001016 770247.
1017
1018- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001019
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001020Extension modules
1021-----------------
1022
1023- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1024 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1025
1026- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1027
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001028- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1029
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001030- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1031 contained within the _strptime module.
1032
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001033- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1034 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1035
1036- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001037 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1038
1039- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1040 the find_class attribute, if present.
1041
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001042- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001043
1044 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1045 (SF bug 763298).
1046
1047 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001048 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1049 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1050 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001051
1052 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1053
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001054Library
1055-------
1056
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001057- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1058
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001059- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1060 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1061 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1062 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1063 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1064 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1065 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1066 or Tester().
1067
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001068- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1069 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1070 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1071 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1072 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1073 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1074 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1075 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1076 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001077
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001078 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001079
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001080- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1081 weren't before was an oversight.
1082
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001083- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1084 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1085
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001086- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1087 when there are no lines.
1088
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001089- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1090 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1091
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001092- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1093 to child processes.
1094
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001095- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1096
1097- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1098
1099- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1100 xmlrpclib.
1101
1102- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1103 responses.
1104
1105- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1106 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1107
1108- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1109 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1110 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1111
1112- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1113 used as patterns.
1114
1115- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1116 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1117 than Tk 8.3.
1118
1119- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1120
1121- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001122
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001123Tools/Demos
1124-----------
1125
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001126- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1127
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001128- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1129
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001130- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001131
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001132Build
1133-----
1134
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001135- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1136
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001137- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1138
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001139- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1140 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001141
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001142- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1143 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1144 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001145
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001146C API
1147-----
1148
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001149- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1150 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1151
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001152Windows
1153-------
1154
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001155- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1156 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1157 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1158 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1159 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1160 Python exception ::
1161
1162 thread.error: can't start new thread
1163
1164 is raised now.
1165
1166- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1167 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1168 instead of from DLL teardown.
1169
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001170Mac
1171---
1172
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001173- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001174 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001175 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1176 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1177 the executable in the bundle.
1178
1179- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001180
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001181- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1182
1183- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1184 on Panther.
1185
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001186What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1187================================
1188
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001189*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001190
1191Core and builtins
1192-----------------
1193
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001194- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1195 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1196 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1197 with the -i option.
1198
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001199- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1200 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1201
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001202- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1203 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1204
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001205- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1206 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1207 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1208 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1209 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1210 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1211 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1212 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1213 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1214 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1215 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1216 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1217 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001218
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001219- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1220 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1221 embedded in a lambda expression.
1222
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001223- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1224 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1225 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1226 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1227 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1228
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001229- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1230 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1231 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1232
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001233- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1234 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1235
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001236- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1237 It's writable again.
1238
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001239- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1240 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1241 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001242 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001243
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001244- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1245 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1246 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1247
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001248Extension modules
1249-----------------
1250
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001251- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1252 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1253
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001254- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1255 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1256 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1257 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1258
1259- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1260 collection.
1261
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001262- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1263 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1264 unique within a single program run.
1265
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001266- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1267 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1268
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001269- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1270 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1271
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001272- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1273 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001274
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001275- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1276
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001277- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1278 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1279
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001280- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1281 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1282 for many BSD-derived systems.
1283
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001284
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001285Library
1286-------
1287
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001288- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1289 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1290 primary ones:
1291
1292 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1293 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1294 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1295
1296 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1297 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1298 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1299 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1300 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1301 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1302
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001303- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1304 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1305 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1306 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1307 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1308 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1309 argument.
1310
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001311- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1312 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1313 in the archive.
1314
1315- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1316 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1317
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001318- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1319 569574).
1320
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001321- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1322 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1323 no more.
1324
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001325- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1326 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1327 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1328 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1329 code coverage.
1330
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001331- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1332 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1333 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001334 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1335 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001336
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001337- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1338 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1339 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001340 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001341
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001342- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1343
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001344- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1345 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1346 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1347 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1348
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001349- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1350 handling.
1351
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001352- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1353 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1354
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001355- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1356 in socket.py.
1357
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001358- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1359
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001360- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1361 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1362 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1363 opener with proxy support.
1364
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001365- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1366
1367- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1368
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001369Tools/Demos
1370-----------
1371
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001372- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1373
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001374- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1375
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001376- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1377 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001378
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001379- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1380 files.
1381
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001382Build
1383-----
1384
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001385- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001386 different root directory.
1387
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001388C API
1389-----
1390
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001391- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1392 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1393 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1394 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1395 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1396 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1397 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1398 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1399 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1400 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1401
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001402- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1403 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1404 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1405 from Python.
1406
1407
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001408New platforms
1409-------------
1410
1411None this time.
1412
1413Tests
1414-----
1415
1416- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1417 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1418
1419Windows
1420-------
1421
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001422- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1423
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001424- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1425 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1426 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1427 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1428 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1429 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1430 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1431 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1432 that's what it's for.
1433
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001434Mac
1435---
1436
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001437- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1438 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1439 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1440 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001441- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1442 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1443- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001444
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001445SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1446------------------------------------
1447
1448430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1449598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1450622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1451661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1452683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1453697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1454713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1455724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1456727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1457729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1458730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1459731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1460732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1461733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1462735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1463740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1464744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1465745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1466747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1467749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1468751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1469753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1470755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1471757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1472760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1473
1474
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001475What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1476================================
1477
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001478*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001479
1480Core and builtins
1481-----------------
1482
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001483- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1484 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1485
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001486- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1487 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1488 and cannot be strings).
1489
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001490- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1491 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1492 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1493 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1494
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001495- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1496 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1497 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1498 Python itself.
1499
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001500- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1501 the referenced object, if it has one.
1502
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001503- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1504 the thread started at
1505 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1506
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001507- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1508 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1509 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1510 placed on a list index.
1511
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001512- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1513 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1514 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1515 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1516
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001517- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1518 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1519 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1520 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1521 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1522 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1523 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1524
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001525- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1526 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1527 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1528 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1529 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1530
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001531- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1532 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001533
1534- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1535 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1536 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1537 #693195.)
1538
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001539- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1540 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001541
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001542- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001543 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001544 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1545 interpreter executions, would fail.
1546
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001547- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001548 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001549 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001550
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001551Extension modules
1552-----------------
1553
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001554- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1555 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1556 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1557 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1558
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001559- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1560 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1561
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001562- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1563 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1564 and Greg Chapman.)
1565
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001566- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1567 recursively.
1568
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001569- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001570 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1571 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1572 leaks.
1573
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001574- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1575
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001576- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1577 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1578 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1579 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1580 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1581 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1582 #705836.
1583
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001584- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001585 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1586
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001587- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1588 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1589 See SF bug #692416.
1590
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001591- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1592 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1593
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001594- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1595 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1596 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001597
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001598- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001599 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1600 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1601
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001602- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1603 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1604 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1605 timeouts to work properly.
1606
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001607Library
1608-------
1609
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001610- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1611 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1612 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1613 future release.
1614
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001615- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1616 for querying platform dependent features.
1617
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001618- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001619
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001620- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1621 pickle protocol versions.
1622
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001623- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1624 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1625 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1626
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001627- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1628
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001629- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1630 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1631 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1632 modules.
1633
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001634- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1635 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1636 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1637
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001638- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1639 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1640
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001641- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1642 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1643 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1644
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001645- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001646 MS Office extensions.
1647
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001648- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1649 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1650
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001651- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1652 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1653
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001654- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1655 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1656 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1657 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1658 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1659 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1660
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001661- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1662 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1663 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001664
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001665- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1666 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1667 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1668
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001669- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1670
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001671- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1672 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1673 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1674
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001675Tools/Demos
1676-----------
1677
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001678- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1679 See the module docstring for details.
1680
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001681Build
1682-----
1683
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001684- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1685 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001686
1687C API
1688-----
1689
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001690- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1691
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001692- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1693 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1694 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1695
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001696- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1697 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001698
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001699 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1700 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1701 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001702
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001703- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001704 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1705
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001706- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1707 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1708 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001709
1710New platforms
1711-------------
1712
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001713None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001714
1715Tests
1716-----
1717
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001718- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1719 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001720
1721Windows
1722-------
1723
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001724- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1725 function.
1726
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001727- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1728 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001729
1730Mac
1731---
1732
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001733- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1734 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001735
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001736- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1737 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001738
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001739- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1740 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1741 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001742
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001743- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001744 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1745 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001746
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001747- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1748 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001749
1750
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001751What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1752=================================
1753
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001754*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001755
1756Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001757-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001758
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001759- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1760 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1761 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1762
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001763- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1764 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1765 (SF patch #664376.)
1766
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001767- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1768 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1769 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1770 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1771 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1772 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001773 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001774
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001775- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1776 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1777 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1778 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001779 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001780
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001781- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1782 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1783 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1784 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1785 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1786 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1787 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1788 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1789 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1790 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1791 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1792
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001793- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1794 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1795 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1796 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1797 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1798 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1799
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001800- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1801 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1802
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001803- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1804 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1805 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1806 case.)
1807
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001808- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1809 passed as unicode strings.
1810
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001811- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1812 See SF bug #683467.
1813
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001814- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1815 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1816
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001817- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1818
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001819- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1820
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001821- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1822 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1823 arguments.
1824
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001825- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1826 See SF bug #667147.
1827
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001828- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001829 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001830 See SF bug #676155.
1831
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001832- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001833 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001834 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1835 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1836 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1837 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1838 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1839 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001840
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001841Extension modules
1842-----------------
1843
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001844- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1845 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1846 tp_as_number pointer.
1847
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001848- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1849 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1850 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1851 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1852 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1853
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001854- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1855
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001856- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1857
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001858- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001859 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001860 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1861 patch #678531.)
1862
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001863- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1864 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1865
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001866- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1867 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1868
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001869- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1870
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001871- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1872 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1873 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1874
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001875- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1876
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001877- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1878 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1879
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001880- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001881
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001882- datetime changes:
1883
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001884 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1885
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001886 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1887 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1888 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1889 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1890 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1891 now.
1892
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001893 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001894 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1895 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001896
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001897 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001898 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001899 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1900 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1901 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1902 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001903
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001904 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1905 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1906 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001907 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1908
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001909 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1910 by a later example coded by Guido.
1911
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001912 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001913 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1914 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1915 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001916 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1917 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1918
1919 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1920 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1921 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1922 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1923 tzinfo subclass instance.
1924
1925 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1926 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1927 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1928 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1929 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1930 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1931 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1932 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001933
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001934 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1935 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1936 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1937 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1938 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001939 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1940
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001941 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001942
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001943 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1944 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1945 as a naive datetime object.
1946
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001947 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1948 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1949 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1950
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001951 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1952 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1953 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1954 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1955 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1956 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1957 comparison.
1958
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001959 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1960 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1961 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1962 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001963 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001964
1965 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001966
1967 and ::
1968
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001969 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1970
1971 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1972 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1973 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1974 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1975
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001976 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1977 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1978 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1979 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1980 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1981
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001982 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1983 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001984 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1985 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001986
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001987Library
1988-------
1989
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001990- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
1991 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
1992
1993- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
1994 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
1995 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
1996 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
1997 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
1998 See PEP 307 for details.
1999
2000- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2001 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2002
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002003- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2004 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002005 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002006 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2007 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002008 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002009
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002010- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2011 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2012
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002013- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2014 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2015 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2016
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002017- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2018
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002019- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2020 exception.
2021
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002022- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2023 class.
2024
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002025- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2026 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2027 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2028
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002029- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2030 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2031
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002032- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002033 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2034 See SF bug #659228.
2035
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002036- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2037 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2038 See SF patch #651082.
2039
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002040- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002041
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002042- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2043 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2044
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002045- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002046 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002047
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002048- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2049 DOS paths from other platforms.
2050
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002051Tools/Demos
2052-----------
2053
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002054- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2055 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2056 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2057 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2058 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2059 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2060 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2061 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2062 example:
2063
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002064 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2065 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002066
2067 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2068
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002069
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002070Build
2071-----
2072
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002073- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2074 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2075 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002076 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2077
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002078 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2079
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002080- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2081 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2082 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2083 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2084 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2085 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2086 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2087 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2088 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2089
2090- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2091 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2092 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2093 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2094
2095- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2096 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2097
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002098C API
2099-----
2100
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002101- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2102 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002103
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002104- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2105 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2106 tp_as_number pointer.
2107
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002108- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2109 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2110 (SF #681367)
2111
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002112- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2113 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2114 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2115 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002116
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002117Tests
2118-----
2119
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002120- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002121 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2122 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2123 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2124 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2125 pydoc.)
2126
2127- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2128
2129- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002130
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002131Windows
2132-------
2133
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002134- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2135 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2136 time).
2137
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002138- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2139 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2140
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002141- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2142 release without strong cryptography.
2143
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002144- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002145 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002146
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002147- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2148 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2149
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002150Mac
2151---
2152
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002153- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2154 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002155
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002156- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2157 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2158 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002159
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002160- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2161 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002162
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002163- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2164 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2165 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2166 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002167
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002168- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002169 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2170 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2171 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002172
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002173
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002174What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002175=================================
2176
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002177*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002178
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002179Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002180--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002181
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002182- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2183
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002184- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2185 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002186 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002187 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002188 a different meaning than before.
2189
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002190- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002191 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002192 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002193
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002194- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002195 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002196 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002197
2198- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2199 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2200 and deallocation.
2201
2202- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2203 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2204
2205- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2206 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2207 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2208 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2209 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2210
2211- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2212 now detected by the garbage collector.
2213
2214- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2215 [SF bug 519621]
2216
2217- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2218 identifier.
2219
2220- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2221 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2222 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2223 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2224 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2225 [SF bug 563060]
2226
2227- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2228 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2229 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2230 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2231 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2232
2233- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2234 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2235 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2236
2237- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2238
2239- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2240 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2241 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2242 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2243 state of the slots would be lost.)
2244
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002245Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002246-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002247
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002248- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002249 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2250 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2251 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2252 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002253 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2254 Jython 2.1.
2255
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002256- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002257 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002258 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2259 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2260 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2261 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2262 these, see PEP 302.
2263
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002264- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2265 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2266 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2267
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002268- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2269 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2270 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2271
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002272- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2273 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2274 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2275
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002276- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2277 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2278 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2279 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2280 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2281 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2282 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2283 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2284 releases or implementations.
2285
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002286- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002287 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2288 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002289
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002290- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2291 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2292
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002293- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2294 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2295 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2296
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002297- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2298 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2299
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002300- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2301 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002302 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2303 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002304
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002305- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2306 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2307 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2308 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2309 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2310
2311 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2312 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2313 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2314 pattern.
2315
2316 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2317 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2318 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2319 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2320
2321 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2322 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2323 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2324 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2325 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2326 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2327
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002328- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2329 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2330 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2331 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2332 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2333 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2334 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2335 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002336
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002337- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2338 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2339 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2340 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2341 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002342 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2343 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2344 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2345 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2346 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2347 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2348 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002349
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002350- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2351 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2352
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002353- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2354 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2355 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2356 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2357 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2358 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2359 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2360 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2361 to Zack Weinberg!
2362
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002363- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2364 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2365 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2366 type. This has been fixed now.
2367
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002368- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2369 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2370 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2371
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002372- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2373 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2374 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2375 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2376 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2377 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2378 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2379 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002380 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002381
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002382- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2383 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2384 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002385
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002386- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2387 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2388 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2389 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2390 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2391 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2392 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2393 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002394 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002395 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2396 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2397
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002398- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2399 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2400 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2401 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2402 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2403 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2404 this.)
2405
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002406- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2407 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002408 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002409 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002410 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2411 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002412 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2413 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002414
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002415- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2416 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2417 currently running.
2418
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002419- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2420 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2421 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2422 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2423
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002424- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2425 as directory names.
2426
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002427- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2428 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2429
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002430- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2431 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2432
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002433- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002434 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2435 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002436
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002437- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2438 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2439 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2440 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2441 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2442
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002443- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2444 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2445 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2446 removed.
2447
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002448- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2449 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2450 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2451
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002452- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2453 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2454 to __debug__.
2455
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002456- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2457 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2458 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2459
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002460- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2461 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2462 deprecated now.
2463
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002464- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2465 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2466 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002467
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002468- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2469 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2470 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2471 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2472 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002473
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002474- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2475 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2476
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002477- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2478 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2479 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002480 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002481 is backward compatible.
2482
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002483- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2484 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2485 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2486 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2487 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2488
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002489- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2490 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2491 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2492 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2493 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2494 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002495
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002496- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2497 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2498
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002499- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2500 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2501
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002502- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2503 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2504 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2505 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2506 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2507
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002508- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2509 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2510 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2511
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002512- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002513 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2514
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002515- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2516 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2517 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002518
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002519- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2520 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2521
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002522- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2523 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2524 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2525
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002526- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2527
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002528Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002529-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002530
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002531- Added three operators to the operator module:
2532 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2533 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2534 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2535
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002536- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2537
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002538- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2539 archives.
2540
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002541- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2542 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2543 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2544
2545 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2546
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002547- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2548 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2549 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002550 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002551
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002552- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2553 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2554 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2555 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002556 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2557 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2558 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2559 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002560
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002561- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2562 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002563
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002564- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2565
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002566- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2567 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2568
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002569- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2570 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2571 supported.
2572
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002573- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2574
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002575- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2576 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002577
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002578- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2579 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2580
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002581- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2582
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002583- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2584 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2585
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002586- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2587 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2588 functions but callable type objects.
2589
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002590- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002591 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002592 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002593
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002594- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2595 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002596
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002597- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2598 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002599
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002600- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2601 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2602 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2603 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2604
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002605- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2606 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002607
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002608- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2609 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2610 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2611 and __imul__.
2612
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002613- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002614 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2615 is called.
2616
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002617- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2618 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2619 interpreter was compiled.
2620
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002621- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2622 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2623 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002624 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002625 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2626 1, not 2.
2627
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002628- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2629 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2630 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2631 limit.
2632
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002633- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2634 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2635 bug #623464.
2636
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002637- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2638 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2639 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2640 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2641
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002642Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002643-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002644
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002645- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2646
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002647- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2648 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2649 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2650 with Python 2.3a2.
2651
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002652- os.path exposes getctime.
2653
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002654- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002655 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002656 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002657 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002658 unit tests of floating point results.
2659
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002660- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2661 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2662 has been increased.
2663
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002664- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2665 executed.
2666
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002667- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2668 postinstallation script.
2669
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002670- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2671 test the current module.
2672
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002673- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002674 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2675 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2676 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2677 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2678
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002679- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002680 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002681 Ward's Optik package.
2682
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002683- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2684 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2685 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2686 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2687
2688- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2689 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002690 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002691
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002692- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2693 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2694 shelf are binary pickles.
2695
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002696- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2697 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2698
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002699- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2700 modules are iterators now.
2701
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002702- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2703 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2704 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2705 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2706 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2707 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002708
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002709- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2710 with their entity value.
2711
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002712- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2713
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002714- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2715 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002716
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002717- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2718 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002719 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002720
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002721- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2722 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2723 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2724 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2725 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2726 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2727 main():
2728
2729 import locale
2730 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2731
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002732- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2733 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2734
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002735- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2736 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2737 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2738 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2739 to the new standard.
2740
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002741- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2742 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2743 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2744 an extension to the database.
2745
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002746- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2747 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2748 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2749 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002750 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002751
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002752- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002753 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002754
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002755- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2756 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2757 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2758 bounded integers.
2759
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002760- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2761 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2762 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2763 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2764 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2765 in existence.
2766
2767 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2768 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2769 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2770 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2771 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2772 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2773
2774 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2775 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2776 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2777 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2778
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002779- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2780 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2781 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2782
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002783- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2784
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002785- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2786 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2787 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2788 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2789
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002790- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2791 argument.
2792
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002793- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2794 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2795 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2796 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2797 [SF patch 560794].
2798
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002799- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2800 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2801 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002802 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2803 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2804 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002805
2806- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2807 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002808
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002809- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2810 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2811 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2812 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002813
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002814- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2815 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2816 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2817 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2818 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2819
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002820- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002821
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002822- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2823
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002824- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2825 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2826 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2827 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2828 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2829 identical to None.
2830
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002831- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2832 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2833 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2834 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2835 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2836 results now.
2837
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002838- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2839 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2840
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002841- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2842 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2843 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2844 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2845 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2846 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2847 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2848 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2849
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002850- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2851
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002852- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2853 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2854
2855- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2856 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2857 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2858 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2859 and other systems.
2860
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002861- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2862 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2863 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2864 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 +00002865 work well with these.
2866
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002867- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2868
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002869- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002870 connections.
2871
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002872- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2873 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2874 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2875
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002876- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2877 sets
2878
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002879- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2880 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2881 name.
2882
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002883- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2884 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2885 passed in.
2886
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002887- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002888 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002889 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2890 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002891
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002892- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2893
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002894- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2895
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002896- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2897 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2898 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2899
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002900- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2901 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2902 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2903 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002904 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002905
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002906- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002907 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002908 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002909
2910- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2911 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2912 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2913
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002914- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002915 the value of its expression argument.
2916
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002917- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2918 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2919 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2920
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002921- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2922 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2923 skipstone browser was included.
2924
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002925- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2926 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2927
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002928Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002929-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002930
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002931- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2932 names in addition to accepting file names.
2933
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002934- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2935 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2936 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2937 still used and useful.)
2938
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002939- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2940 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2941 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2942 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002943
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002944- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2945 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2946 the generated binary.
2947
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002948Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002949-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002950
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002951- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2952
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002953- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2954 except in the hands of experts.
2955
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002956- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002957 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2958 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2959 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002960
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002961- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2962 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2963 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2964 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2965 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2966 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2967 builds.
2968
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002969- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2970 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2971 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2972 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2973 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2974 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2975 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2976 new type.
2977
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002978- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002979
2980 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2981 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2982 positive infinities.
2983
2984 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2985 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2986 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2987 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
2988 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
2989 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
2990 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
2991
2992 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
2993
2994 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
2995
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00002996- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
2997 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
2998 size of the executable.
2999
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003000- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3001 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3002 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3003 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003004
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003005- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3006
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003007- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3008 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3009 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003010
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003011- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3012 well as Unix.
3013
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003014- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3015 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3016 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3017 modules in the README file for details.
3018
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003019C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003020-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003021
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003022- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3023 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003024 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003025 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003026 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003027
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003028- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3029 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3030 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3031 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3032 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3033 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003034 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003035 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3036 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3037 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3038 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3039 aligned.)
3040
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003041- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3042 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3043 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3044
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003045- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3046 level.
3047
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003048- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3049 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3050 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3051 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3052 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3053
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003054- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3055 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3056 code.
3057
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003058- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3059 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3060 adjusting for negative indices.
3061
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003062- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3063 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3064 object.
3065
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003066- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3067 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3068 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3069
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003070- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3071 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003072
3073- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3074
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003075- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3076 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3077 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3078 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3079
3080- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3081
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003082- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003083
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003084- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003085 without going through the buffer API.
3086
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003087- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003088
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003089- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3090 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3091 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3092 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3093
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003094- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3095 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3096
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003097- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003098 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3099
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003100New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003101-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003102
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003103- OpenVMS is now supported.
3104
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003105- AtheOS is now supported.
3106
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003107- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3108
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003109- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3110
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003111Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003112-----
3113
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003114- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3115 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3116 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003117
3118Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003119-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003120
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003121- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3122 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3123 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3124 bugs.
3125 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003126 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003127 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3128 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003129 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003130
3131- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003132 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003133
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003134- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3135 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3136
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003137- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3138 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003139 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003140 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3141
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003142- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3143 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3144 use files" uninstall option).
3145
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003146- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3147
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003148- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3149 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3150
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003151- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3152 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3153 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3154
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003155- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3156 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3157 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3158 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3159 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003160 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3161 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3162 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003163
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003164- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003165 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003166 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3167 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3168 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3169 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3170 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3171 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3172 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3173 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3174 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3175 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3176 work around.
3177
3178- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3179 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3180 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3181 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3182 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3183 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3184 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3185 specified with O_CREAT too).
3186
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003187Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003188----
3189
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003190- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003191
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003192- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3193 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3194 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3195
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003196- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3197 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3198 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3199
3200- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3201 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3202 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3203 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3204 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3205 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3206 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3207 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003208
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003209- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3210 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3211 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003212
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003213- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3214 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3215 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3216 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3217 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003218
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003219- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3220 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3221 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003222
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003223- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3224 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003225
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003226- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3227 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3228 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3229 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3230 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003231
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003232- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3233 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3234 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3235
3236- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3237 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3238 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003239
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003240- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3241 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3242 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3243 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003244 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003245
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003246- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3247 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003248
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003249- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3250 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003251
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003252- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003253 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003254 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3255 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003256
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003257
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003258What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003259===============================
3260
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003261*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3262
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003263Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003264--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003265
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003266- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3267 with a custom metaclass.
3268
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003269Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003270-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003271
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003272- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3273 are proxies.
3274
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003275Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003276-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003277
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003278- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3279 very short strings.
3280
3281- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3282 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3283 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3284 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3285 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3286
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003287Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003288-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003289
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003290- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3291 close or delete time).
3292
3293- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3294 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3295
3296- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3297
3298- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003299 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003300
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003301Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003302-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003303
3304Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003305-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003306
3307C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003308-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003309
3310New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003311-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003312
3313Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003314-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003315
3316Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003317-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003318
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003319- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3320
3321- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3322 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3323
3324- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3325 deleted at process exit time.
3326
3327- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3328 in backslash.
3329
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003330Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003331----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003332
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003333- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3334 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3335 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3336
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003337
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003338What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003339===========================
3340
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003341*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3342
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003343Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003344--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003345
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003346- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3347 been extensively updated. See
3348
3349 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3350
3351 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3352
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003353- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3354 deleted!
3355
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003356- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3357 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3358 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3359 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3360 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3361
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003362- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3363
3364 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3365 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3366
3367 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3368 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3369 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3370 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3371 supported anyway.
3372
3373 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3374 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3375
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003376- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3377 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3378 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3379 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3380 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003381
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003382- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3383 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3384 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3385
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003386Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003387-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003388
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003389- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3390 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3391 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3392 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3393 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3394 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003395 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3396 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3397 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3398 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003399
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003400- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3401 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3402 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3403
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003404Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003405-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003406
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003407- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3408
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003409Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003410-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003411
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003412- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3413 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3414 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3415 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3416 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3417 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3418
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003419- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3420
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003421- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3422
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003423- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3424
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003425- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3426 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3427 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3428
3429- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3430
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003431Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003432-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003433
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003434- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3435 off a search on Google.
3436
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003437Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003438-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003439
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003440- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3441 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3442 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3443 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3444 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3445 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3446 other platforms should do likewise.
3447
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003448- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3449 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3450 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3451
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003452C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003453-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003454
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003455- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3456 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3457 producing key-value pairs.
3458
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003459- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003460 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003461 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3462 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3463 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3464 previously went unchallenged.
3465
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003466New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003467-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003468
3469Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003470-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003471
3472Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003473-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003474
3475Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003476----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003477
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003478- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3479 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003480
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003481- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3482 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3483 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3484 home.
3485
3486
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003487What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003488===========================
3489
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003490*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3491
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003492Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003493--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003494
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003495- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3496 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003497
3498 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003499 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003500
3501 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3502 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003503 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003504 This needs to be documented.
3505
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003506- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3507 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3508
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003509- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3510 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3511 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3512
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003513- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3514 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3515
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003516- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3517 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3518 class forbids it).
3519
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003520- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3521 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3522 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3523
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003524- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3525
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003526Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003527-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003528
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003529- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3530 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003531 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003532
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003533- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3534 (like 1 + '').
3535
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003536Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003537-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003538
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003539- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3540 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3541 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3542 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003543 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003544 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3545
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003546- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3547 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3548 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3549 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3550
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003551- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3552 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003553 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3554 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3555 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003556
3557- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3558 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003559
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003560- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3561 bytes on its input.
3562
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003563Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003564-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003565
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003566- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003567 convenience function.
3568
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003569- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3570 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3571 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003572 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3573 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3574 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3575 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3576 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3577 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003578
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003579- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3580 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3581 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3582 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3583
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003584- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3585 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3586 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3587
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003588- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3589 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3590 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3591 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3592
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003593- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3594 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003595 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003596 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3597 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3598 new -l and -e options.
3599
3600- statcache is now deprecated.
3601
3602- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3603 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003604 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003605 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3606 time properly taken into account.
3607
3608- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3609 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3610 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3611 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3612
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003613Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003614-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003615
3616Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003617-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003618
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003619- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3620 is built with libdb3 if available.
3621
3622- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3623
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003624C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003625-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003626
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003627- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3628 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3629 PySequence_Size().
3630
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003631- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3632
3633- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3634 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3635 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3636
3637- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3638 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3639
3640- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3641 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3642
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003643New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003644-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003645
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003646- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3647 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3648
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003649- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3650 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3651
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003652- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3653
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003654Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003655-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003656
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003657- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3658 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3659
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003660Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003661-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003662
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003663Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003664----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003665
3666- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3667 removed completely in the next release.
3668
3669- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3670 OSX.
3671
3672- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3673 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3674
3675- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3676
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003677
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003678What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003679===========================
3680
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003681*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3682
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003683Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003684--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003685
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003686- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003687 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003688 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003689 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3690 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003691 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3692 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003693 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3694 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003695
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003696- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3697 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3698
3699- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3700 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3701
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003702Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003703-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003704
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003705- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3706 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3707 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3708 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3709 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3710 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3711 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3712 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3713
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003714- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3715 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3716 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3717 example).
3718
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003719- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003720 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003721 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003722 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003723
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003724- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3725 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3726 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003727 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003728
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003729- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3730 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3731 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3732 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3733 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3734 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3735
3736 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3737
3738 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3739
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003740Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003741-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003742
3743- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3744
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003745- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3746
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003747- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3748 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003749
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003750- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3751 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3752 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3753 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3754 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3755 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003756 attributes.
3757
3758- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3759 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3760 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003761
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003762- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3763 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3764 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003765
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003766- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3767 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3768 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003769 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3770 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3771
3772- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3773 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003774
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003775Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003776-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003777
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003778- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3779 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3780
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003781- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3782 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3783 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3784 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3785
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003786- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3787 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3788 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3789 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3790
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003791 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3792 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3793 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3794 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3795 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3796 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3797 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3798 without losing information).
3799
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003800- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003801 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3802 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3803 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3804 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3805 module).
3806
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003807 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003808 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3809 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3810 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3811 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003812
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003813- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003814 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3815 encoding.
3816
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003817- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3818 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3819
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003820- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003821 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3822
3823- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3824 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3825 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3826 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3827
3828- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3829
3830- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3831 ON, and OFF.
3832
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003833- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3834 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3835
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003836Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003837-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003838
3839- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3840 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3841 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003842
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003843- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3844 been added: -X and -E.
3845
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003846Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003847-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003848
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003849- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3850 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3851
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003852C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003853-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003854
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003855- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3856 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3857 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3858 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3859 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3860
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003861- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3862 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3863 as long) arguments.
3864
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003865- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3866 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3867 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3868 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3869 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3870 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3871
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003872- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3873 input.
3874
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003875New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003876-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003877
3878Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003879-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003880
3881Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003882-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003883
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003884- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3885 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3886 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3887
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003888- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3889 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3890 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003891 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003892
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003893 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3894 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3895 import signal
3896 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003897
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003898 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003899 while 1:
3900 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003901 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003902 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3903 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3904 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3905 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003906
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003907
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003908What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3909===========================
3910
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003911*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3912
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003913Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003914--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003915
3916- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3917 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3918 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3919
3920- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3921 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3922 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3923 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3924 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3925 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3926 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003927
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003928- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003929 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003930 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3931 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3932 associate a docstring with a property.
3933
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003934- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3935 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3936 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3937 other built-in object types.
3938
3939- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3940 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3941 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3942 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3943 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3944
3945- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3946 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3947
3948- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3949 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003950 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003951 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3952 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3953 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3954 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3955 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3956
3957- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3958 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3959 class.
3960
3961- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3962 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3963 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3964 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3965
3966- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3967 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3968 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3969 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3970
3971- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3972 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3973
3974- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3975 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3976 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3977 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3978 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003979 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003980 with the same value as s.
3981
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003982- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3983
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003984Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003985----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003986
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003987- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
3988
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00003989- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
3990 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
3991 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
3992 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
3993 objects.
3994
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003995- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
3996 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00003997 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
3998 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
3999
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004000- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4001 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4002 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4003
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004004Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004005-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004006
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004007- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4008 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4009 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4010 by the instances.
4011
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004012- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4013 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4014 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4015
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004016- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4017 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4018 before the entire comparison is complete.
4019
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004020- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4021 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4022 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4023
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004024- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4025 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4026 getwriter().
4027
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004028- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4029 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4030
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004031- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004032 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4033 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4034
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004035- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4036 iterable object.
4037
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004038- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4039 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004040
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004041- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4042 authentication.
4043
4044- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4045 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004046
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004047- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004048 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4049 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4050 a sample driver.)
4051
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004052Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004053-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004054
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004055- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4056 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4057 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4058 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4059 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4060 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4061 kernel has large file support.
4062
4063- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4064 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4065 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4066 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4067 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4068
4069- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4070 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4071 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4072
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004073C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004074-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004075
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004076- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4077 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4078
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004079New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004080-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004081
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004082- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4083 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4084
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004085Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004086-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004087
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004088- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4089 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4090 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4091 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4092 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4093
4094- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4095 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4096 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4097 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4098
4099- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4100 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4101
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004102Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004103-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004104
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004105- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004106 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4107 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004108
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004109
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004110What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4111===========================
4112
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004113*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4114
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004115Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004116----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004117
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004118- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4119 big to represent as a C double.
4120
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004121- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4122 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4123 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4124 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4125 restriction).
4126
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004127- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4128 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4129 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4130 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4131 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4132
4133 >>> dir([])
4134 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4135 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4136 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4137 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4138 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4139 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4140 'reverse', 'sort']
4141
4142 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4143
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004144- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004145 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4146 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4147 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4148 OverflowError exception.
4149
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004150- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004151 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004152 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4153 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4154 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4155 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4156 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004157 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004158 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4159 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4160
4161 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4162 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4163 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4164 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004165
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004166- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004167 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4168 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4169 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4170 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4171 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4172 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4173 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4174 once it is created.
4175
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004176- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4177 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4178 (key, value) pairs.
4179
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004180- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004181 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4182 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4183
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004184- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4185 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4186 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4187 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4188 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004189
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004190- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004191 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4192 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4193
4194 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4195
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004196- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004197 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4198
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004199Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004200-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004201
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004202- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004203 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4204 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004205
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004206- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4207 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4208 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4209 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4210 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4211 in this area anymore).
4212
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004213- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4214 threading.Timer.
4215
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004216- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4217 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4218
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004219- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004220 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4221
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004222- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004223 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4224 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4225 converted to Python longs.
4226
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004227- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004228 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4229
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004230- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4231 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4232 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4233
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004234Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004235-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004236
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004237- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4238 division operators as per PEP 238.
4239
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004240Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004241-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004242
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004243- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4244 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4245 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4246 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4247
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004248C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004249-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004250
4251- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004252
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004253- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4254 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004255 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004256
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004257 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4258 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004259 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004260 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004261
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004262- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004263 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4264 module:
4265
4266 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004267
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004268 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4269 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004270
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004271 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4272 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004273
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004274 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4275
4276 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4277
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004278- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004279 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4280 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4281 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004282
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004283New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004284-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004285
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004286- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4287 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4288 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4289 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4290 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004291
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004292Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004293-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004294
4295Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004296-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004297
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004298- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4299 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4300 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4301 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004302 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4303 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4304 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4305 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4306 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004307
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004308- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004309 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4310
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004311
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004312What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4313===========================
4314
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004315*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4316
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004317Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004318-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004319
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004320- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4321 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4322
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004323- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4324 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4325 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004326
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004327- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4328 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4329 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4330 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004331
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004332- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4333
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004334- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004335
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004336Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004337-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004338
4339- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004340 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004341 the module docstring for details.
4342
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004343Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004344-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004345
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004346- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004347 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4348 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4349 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004350
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004351- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4352 Nick Mathewson.
4353
4354Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004355----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004356
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004357- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4358 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4359 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4360 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4361 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4362 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4363 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4364 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4365
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004366- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4367 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4368 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4369 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4370
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004371- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4372 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4373 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4374 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4375 come a long way).
4376
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004377- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4378 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4379 write filters for these warnings).
4380
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004381- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4382 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4383 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4384 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4385 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4386
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004387- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4388 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4389 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4390 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4391 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4392 older distribution.
4393
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004394Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004395-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004396
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004397- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4398 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004399 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004400
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004401- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4402 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4403 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4404
4405- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4406
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004407- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4408
4409- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4410
4411- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4412
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004413- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004414
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004415- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4416
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004417New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004418-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004419
4420C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004421-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004422
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004423- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4424 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4425 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4426 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4427 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4428 against buffer overruns.
4429
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004430- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004431 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4432 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004433 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4434 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4435 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4436
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004437- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4438 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4439 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4440 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4441 deprecated.
4442
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004443Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004444-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004445
4446- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4447 relevant is found.
4448
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004449
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004450What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004451===========================
4452
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004453*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4454
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004455Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004456----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004457
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004458- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4459 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4460 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4461 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4462 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4463 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4464 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4465 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004466 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004467 repaired.
4468
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004469- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004470 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004471 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4472 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4473 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4474 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4475 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4476 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4477 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4478 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4479
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004480- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4481 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4482 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4483 leading BMO character).
4484
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004485- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4486 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4487 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4488
4489 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4490 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4491 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004492
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004493 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4494 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4495 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4496 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4497 for various simple to use conversions.
4498
4499 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4500 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4501
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004502 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4503 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4504 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4505 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4506 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4507 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4508 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4509 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4510 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4511 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4512 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4513 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4514 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4515 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4516 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004517
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004518- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4519 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4520 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004521 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004522 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004523
4524 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004525 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4526 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4527 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4528 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4529 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004530 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4531 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004532
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004533 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4534 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4535 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004536 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004537
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004538- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4539 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4540 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4541 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4542 floating arithmetic,
4543
4544 x = 9007199254740992.0
4545 print long(x)
4546
4547 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4548 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4549 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4550 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4551 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4552 functions are of good quality).
4553
4554 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4555 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4556 algorithms to break.
4557
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004558- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4559 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4560 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4561 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4562 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4563 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4564 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4565 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4566 order.
4567
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004568- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4569 operation along the most common code paths.
4570
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004571- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4572 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4573
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004574- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4575 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4576 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4577 {}.update(UserDict())
4578
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004579- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4580 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4581 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4582 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4583 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4584 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4585 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4586 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4587
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004588- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004589 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004590
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004591 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004592 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4593 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004594 join() method of strings
4595 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004596 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4597 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004598 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004599 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004600
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004601- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4602 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4603
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004604- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4605 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4606
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004607- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4608 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4609 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4610 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4611
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004612- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4613 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004614 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004615 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4616 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004617
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004618- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4619
4620
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004621Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004622-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004623
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004624- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004625 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004626 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4627 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4628
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004629- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4630 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4631
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004632- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4633 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4634 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4635 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4636
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004637- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4638 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4639 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4640
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004641- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4642
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004643- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4644
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004645- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4646 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4647 that are still imported into string.py).
4648
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004649- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4650
4651- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4652 Now it does.
4653
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004654- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4655
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004656- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4657 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4658 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4659 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4660 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004661 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4662 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004663
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004664- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4665 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4666 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4667 'help(object)'.
4668
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004669Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004670-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004671
4672- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004673 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004674 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4675 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4676
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004677- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004678 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4679 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004680
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004681C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004682-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004683
4684- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4685 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004686
4687----
4688
4689**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**