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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
Anthony Baxter32083f62004-08-02 06:24:59 +000015- PEP-0318, Function Decorators have been added to the language. These are
16 implemented using the Java-style @decorator syntax, like so:
17 @staticmethod
18 def foo(bar):
19 (The PEP needs to be updated to reflect this XXX before 2.4a2)
20
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +000021- When importing a module M raises an exception, Python no longer leaves M
22 in sys.modules. Before 2.4a2 it did, and a subsequent import of M would
23 succeed, picking up a module object from sys.modules reflecting as much
24 of the initialization of M as completed before the exception was raised.
25 Subsequent imports got no indication that M was in a partially-
26 initialized state, and the importers could get into arbitrarily bad
27 trouble as a result (the M they got was in an unintended state,
28 arbitrarily far removed from M's author's intent). Now subsequent
29 imports of M will continue raising exceptions (but if, for example, the
30 source code for M is edited between import attempts, then perhaps later
31 attempts will succeed, or raise a different exception).
32
33 This can break existing code, but in such cases the code was probably
34 working before by accident. In the Python source, the only case of
35 breakage discovered was in a test accidentally relying on a damaged
36 module remaining in sys.modules. Cases are also known where tests
37 deliberately provoking import errors remove damaged modules from
38 sys.modules themselves, and such tests will break now if they do an
39 unconditional del sys.modules[M].
40
Marc-André Lemburgb314ce92004-07-23 16:14:57 +000041- u'%s' % obj will now try obj.__unicode__() first and fallback to
42 obj.__str__() if no __unicode__ method can be found.
43
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000044- Patch #550732: Add PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords(). Analogous to
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000045 PyArg_VaParse(). Both are now documented. Thanks Greg Chapman.
Brett Cannon711e7d92004-07-10 22:20:32 +000046
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000047- Allow string and unicode return types from .encode()/.decode()
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000048 methods on string and unicode objects. Added unicode.decode()
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000049 which was missing for no apparent reason.
50
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +000051- An attempt to fix the mess that is Python's behaviour with
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000052 signal handlers and threads, complicated by readline's behaviour.
53 It's quite possible that there are still bugs here.
54
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +000055- Added C macros Py_CLEAR and Py_VISIT to ease the implementation of
56 types that support garbage collection.
57
Raymond Hettinger76d962d2004-07-16 12:16:48 +000058- Compiler now treats None as a constant.
59
Neil Schemenauer3a313e32004-07-19 16:29:17 +000060- The type of values returned by __int__, __float__, __long__,
61 __oct__, and __hex__ are now checked. Returning an invalid type
62 will cause a TypeError to be raised. This matches the behavior of
63 Jython.
64
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +000065- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in locale module.
66
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000067Extension modules
68-----------------
69
Martin v. Löwis544f1192004-07-27 05:22:33 +000070- cpickle now supports the same keyword arguments as pickle.
71
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +000072Library
73-------
74
Martin v. Löwis9513e342004-08-03 14:36:32 +000075- nntplib does now allow to ignore a .netrc file.
76
Martin v. Löwis65a79752004-08-03 12:59:55 +000077- urllib2 now recognizes Basic authentication even if other authentication
78 schemes are offered.
79
Neal Norwitz0e67fd42004-08-01 22:48:06 +000080- Bug #1001053. wave.open() now accepts unicode filenames.
81
Tim Peters5cfb05e2004-07-27 21:02:02 +000082- gzip.GzipFile has a new fileno() method, to retrieve the handle of the
83 underlying file object (provided it has a fileno() method). This is
84 needed if you want to use os.fsync() on a GzipFile.
85
Martin v. Löwis7b9190b2004-07-27 05:07:19 +000086- imaplib has two new methods: deleteacl and myrights.
87
Martin v. Löwiscc0f9322004-07-26 12:40:50 +000088- nntplib has two new methods: description and descriptions. They
89 use a more RFC-compliant way of getting a newsgroup description.
90
Brett Cannon8b3d92a2004-07-21 02:21:58 +000091- Bug #993394. Fix a possible red herring of KeyError in 'threading' being
92 raised during interpreter shutdown from a registered function with atexit
93 when dummy_threading is being used.
94
Neal Norwitza4f651a2004-07-20 22:07:44 +000095- Bug #857297/Patch #916874. Fix an error when extracting a hard link
96 from a tarfile.
97
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +000098- Patch #846659. Fix an error in tarfile.py when using
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +000099 GNU longname/longlink creation.
Neal Norwitz0662f8a2004-07-20 21:54:18 +0000100
Tim Peters90ee7eb2004-07-18 23:58:17 +0000101- The obsolete FCNTL.py has been deleted. The builtin fcntl module
102 has been available (on platforms that support fcntl) since Python
103 1.5a3, and all FCNTL.py did is export fcntl's names, after generating
104 a deprecation warning telling you to use fcntl directly.
105
Hye-Shik Chang2bb146f2004-07-18 03:06:29 +0000106- Several new unicode codecs are added: big5hkscs, euc_jis_2004,
107 iso2022_jp_2004, shift_jis_2004.
108
Tim Peters5af0e412004-07-12 00:45:14 +0000109- Bug #788520. Queue.{get, get_nowait, put, put_nowait} have new
110 implementations, exploiting Conditions (which didn't exist at the time
111 Queue was introduced). A minor semantic change is that the Full and
112 Empty exceptions raised by non-blocking calls now occur only if the
113 queue truly was full or empty at the instant the queue was checked (of
114 course the Queue may no longer be full or empty by the time a calling
115 thread sees those exceptions, though). Before, the exceptions could
116 also be raised if it was "merely inconvenient" for the implementation
117 to determine the true state of the Queue (because the Queue was locked
118 by some other method in progress).
119
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000120- Bugs #979794 and #980117: difflib.get_grouped_opcodes() now handles the
121 case of comparing two empty lists. This affected both context_diff() and
122 unified_diff(),
Brett Cannond2c5b4b2004-07-10 23:54:07 +0000123
Brett Cannone6f8a892004-07-10 23:14:30 +0000124- Bug #980938: smtplib now prints debug output to sys.stderr.
125
Brett Cannonf50299c2004-07-10 22:55:15 +0000126- Bug #930024: posixpath.realpath() now handles infinite loops in symlinks by
127 returning the last point in the path that was not part of any loop. Thanks
128 AM Kuchling.
129
Brett Cannonbdc36272004-07-10 20:42:22 +0000130- Bug #980327: ntpath not handles compressing erroneous slashes between the
131 drive letter and the rest of the path. Also clearly handles UNC addresses now
132 as well. Thanks Paul Moore.
133
Brett Cannone6751182004-07-10 19:13:42 +0000134- bug #679953: zipfile.py should now work for files over 2 GB. The packed data
135 for file sizes (compressed and uncompressed) was being stored as signed
136 instead of unsigned.
137
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000138- decimal.py now only uses signals in the IBM spec. The other conditions are
Raymond Hettinger5aa478b2004-07-09 10:02:53 +0000139 no longer part of the public API.
140
Marc-André Lemburg88fcca62004-07-10 16:16:06 +0000141- codecs module now has two new generic APIs: encode() and decode()
142 which don't restrict the return types (unlike the unicode and
143 string methods of the same name).
144
Andrew M. Kuchling64ed2982004-07-10 18:43:32 +0000145- asyncore's dispatcher.set_reuse_addr() now works correctly on Windows.
146 SF patch 982681.
147
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000148- Non-blocking SSL sockets work again; they were broken in Python 2.3.
Andrew M. Kuchling79d7e922004-07-10 21:21:55 +0000149 SF patch 945642.
150
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000151- doctest unittest integration improvements:
152
153 o Improved the unitest test output for doctest-based unit tests
154
155 o Can now pass setUp and tearDown functions when creating
156 DocTestSuites.
157
158- The threading module has a new class, local, for creating objects
159 that provide thread-local data.
160
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000161- Bug #990307: when keep_empty_values is True, cgi.parse_qsl()
162 no longer returns spurious empty fields.
163
Gustavo Niemeyer7bd33c52004-07-22 18:44:01 +0000164- Implemented bind_textdomain_codeset() in gettext module.
165
166- Introduced in gettext module the l*gettext() family of functions,
167 which return translation strings encoded in the preferred encoding,
168 as informed by locale module's getpreferredencoding().
169
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000170- optparse module (and tests) upgraded to Optik 1.5a1. Changes:
171
172 - Add expansion of default values in help text: the string
173 "%default" in an option's help string is expanded to str() of
174 that option's default value, or "none" if no default value.
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000175
Greg Ward9c8fe1a2004-07-31 16:16:11 +0000176 - Bug #955889: option default values that happen to be strings are
177 now processed in the same way as values from the command line; this
178 allows generation of nicer help when using custom types. Can
179 be disabled with parser.set_process_default_values(False).
180
181 - Bug #960515: don't crash when generating help for callback
182 options that specify 'type', but not 'dest' or 'metavar'.
183
184 - Feature #815264: change the default help format for short options
185 that take an argument from e.g. "-oARG" to "-o ARG"; add
186 set_short_opt_delimiter() and set_long_opt_delimiter() methods to
187 HelpFormatter to allow (slight) customization of the formatting.
188
189 - Patch #736940: internationalize Optik: all built-in user-
190 targeted literal strings are passed through gettext.gettext(). (If
191 you want translations (.po files), they're not included with Python
192 -- you'll find them in the Optik source distribution from
193 http://optik.sourceforge.net/ .)
194
195 - Bug #878453: respect $COLUMNS environment variable for
196 wrapping help output.
197
198 - Feature #988122: expand "%prog" in the 'description' passed
199 to OptionParser, just like in the 'usage' and 'version' strings.
200 (This is *not* done in the 'description' passed to OptionGroup.)
Neil Schemenauer66edb622004-07-19 15:38:11 +0000201
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000202Tools/Demos
203-----------
204
205Build
206-----
207
208C API
209-----
210
Tim Peters94f9b862004-08-02 03:48:03 +0000211- PyImport_ExecCodeModule() and PyImport_ExecCodeModuleEx(): if an
212 error occurs while loading the module, these now delete the module's
213 entry from sys.modules. All ways of loading modules eventually call
214 one of these, so this is an error-case change in semantics for all
215 ways of loading modules. In rare cases, a module loader may wish
216 to keep a module object in sys.modules despite that the module's
217 code cannot be executed. In such cases, the module loader must
218 arrange to reinsert the name and module object in sys.modules.
219 PyImport_ReloadModule() has been changed to reinsert the original
220 module object into sys.modules if the module reload fails, so that
221 its visible semantics have not changed.
222
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000223- A large pile of datetime field-extraction macros is now documented,
224 thanks to Anthony Tuininga (patch #986010).
225
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000226Documentation
227-------------
228
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000229- Improved the tutorial on creating types in C.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000230
231 - point out the importance of reassigning data members before
232 assigning thier values
233
234 - correct my missconception about return values from visitprocs. Sigh.
235
236 - mention the labor saving Py_VISIT and Py_CLEAR macros.
237
Tim Peters66bb6e62004-07-24 23:00:24 +0000238- Major rewrite of the math module docs, to address common confusions.
Jim Fultone8274372004-07-14 19:08:28 +0000239
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000240New platforms
241-------------
242
243Tests
244-----
245
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000246- The test data files for the decimal test suite are now installed on
Anthony Baxterfd4984d2004-07-12 09:33:39 +0000247 platforms that use the Makefile.
248
Tim Petersaa1c7ff2004-07-22 00:54:37 +0000249- SF patch 995225: The test file testtar.tar accidentally contained
250 CVS keywords (like $Id$), which could cause spurious failures in
251 test_tarfile.py depending on how the test file was checked out.
252
Anthony Baxter563e4492004-07-09 07:30:10 +0000253Windows
254-------
255
256Mac
257---
258
259
260
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000261What's New in Python 2.4 alpha 1?
262=================================
263
Anthony Baxter3210b362004-07-08 05:59:43 +0000264*Release date: 08-JUL-2004*
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000265
266Core and builtins
267-----------------
268
Fred Drake0a4dd392004-07-02 18:57:45 +0000269- weakref.ref is now the type object also known as
270 weakref.ReferenceType; it can be subclassed like any other new-style
271 class. There's less per-entry overhead in WeakValueDictionary
272 objects now (one object instead of three).
273
Thomas Heller04c673b2004-07-02 08:56:20 +0000274- Bug #951851: Python crashed when reading import table of certain
275 Windows DLLs.
276
Raymond Hettinger66bd2332004-08-02 08:30:07 +0000277- Bug #215126. The locals argument to eval(), execfile(), and exec now
278 accept any mapping type.
Raymond Hettinger214b1c32004-07-02 06:41:07 +0000279
Martin v. Löwisef82d2f2004-06-27 16:51:46 +0000280- marshal now shares interned strings. This change introduces
281 a new .pyc magic.
282
Anthony Baxter3ecdb252004-06-11 14:41:18 +0000283- Bug #966623. classes created with type() in an exec(, {}) don't
284 have a __module__, but code in typeobject assumed it would always
285 be there.
286
Martin v. Löwis737ea822004-06-08 18:52:54 +0000287- Python no longer relies on the LC_NUMERIC locale setting to be
288 the "C" locale; as a result, it no longer tries to prevent changing
289 the LC_NUMERIC category.
290
Tim Peters604c0132004-06-07 23:04:33 +0000291- Bug #952807: Unpickling pickled instances of subclasses of
292 datetime.date, datetime.datetime and datetime.time could yield insane
293 objects. Thanks to Jiwon Seo for a fix.
294
Thomas Heller90a764c2004-06-07 15:12:44 +0000295- Bug #845802: Python crashes when __init__.py is a directory.
296
Hye-Shik Changbc555e32004-06-03 11:10:58 +0000297- Unicode objects received two new methods: iswide() and width().
298 These query East Asian width information, as specified in Unicode
299 TR11.
Hye-Shik Chang974ed7c2004-06-02 16:49:17 +0000300
Raymond Hettinger41bd0222004-06-01 06:36:24 +0000301- Improved the tuple hashing algorithm to give fewer collisions in
302 common cases. Fixes bug #942952.
303
Raymond Hettinger354433a2004-05-19 08:20:33 +0000304- Implemented generator expressions (PEP 289). Coded by Jiwon Seo.
305
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000306- Enabled the profiling of C extension functions (and builtins) - check
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000307 new documentation and modified profile and bdb modules for more details
Nicholas Bastinc69ebe82004-03-24 21:57:10 +0000308
Nicholas Bastinabce8a62004-03-21 20:24:07 +0000309- Set file.name to the object passed to open (instead of a new string)
310
Nicholas Bastina7604bf2004-03-21 18:37:23 +0000311- Moved tracebackobject into traceback.h and renamed to PyTracebackObject
312
Raymond Hettingerff5bc502004-03-21 15:12:00 +0000313- Optimized the byte coding for multiple assignments like "a,b=b,a" and
314 "a,b,c=1,2,3". Improves their speed by 25% to 30%.
315
Brett Cannon4f653312004-03-20 22:52:14 +0000316- Limit the nested depth of a tuple for the second argument to isinstance()
317 and issubclass() to the recursion limit of the interpreter.
318 Fixes bug #858016 .
319
Raymond Hettingerade08ea2004-03-18 09:48:12 +0000320- Optimized dict iterators, creating separate types for each
321 and having them reveal their length. Also optimized the
322 methods: keys(), values(), and items().
323
Raymond Hettingerdd80f762004-03-07 07:31:06 +0000324- Implemented a newcode opcode, LIST_APPEND, that simplifies
325 the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and further
326 improves their performance (about 35%).
327
Michael W. Hudsond3b33b52004-02-19 19:35:22 +0000328- Implemented rich comparisons for floats, which seems to make
329 comparisons involving NaNs somewhat less surprising when the
330 underlying C compiler actually implements C99 semantics.
331
Raymond Hettingerfa7b9d82004-02-15 04:06:39 +0000332- Optimized list.extend() to save memory and no longer create
333 intermediate sequences. Also, extend() now pre-allocates the
334 needed memory whenever the length of the iterable is known in
335 advance -- this halves the time to extend the list.
336
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000337- Optimized list resize operations to make fewer calls to the system
338 realloc(). Significantly speeds up list appends, list pops,
339 list comprehensions, and the list contructor (when the input iterable
340 length is not known).
341
342- Changed the internal list over-allocation scheme. For larger lists,
343 overallocation ranged between 3% and 25%. Now, it is a constant 12%.
Raymond Hettingerab517d22004-02-14 18:34:46 +0000344 For smaller lists (n<8), overallocation was upto eight elements. Now,
345 the overallocation is no more than three elements -- this improves space
Raymond Hettinger4bb95402004-02-13 11:36:39 +0000346 utilization for applications that have large numbers of small lists.
347
Raymond Hettinger0468e412004-05-05 05:37:53 +0000348- Most list bodies now get re-used rather than freed. Speeds up list
349 instantiation and deletion by saving calls to malloc() and free().
350
Raymond Hettinger31017ae2004-03-04 08:25:44 +0000351- The dict.update() method now accepts all the same argument forms
352 as the dict() constructor. This now includes item lists and/or
353 keyword arguments.
354
Michael W. Hudsonecfeb7f2004-02-12 15:28:27 +0000355- Support for arbitrary objects supporting the read-only buffer
356 interface as the co_code field of code objects (something that was
357 only possible to create from C code) has been removed.
358
Fred Drake228765b2004-02-06 04:15:22 +0000359- Made omitted callback and None equivalent for weakref.ref() and
360 weakref.proxy(); the None case wasn't handled correctly in all
361 cases.
362
363- Fixed problem where PyWeakref_NewRef() and PyWeakref_NewProxy()
364 assumed that initial existing entries in an object's weakref list
365 would not be removed while allocating a new weakref object. Since
366 GC could be invoked at that time, however, that assumption was
367 invalid. In a truly obscure case of GC being triggered during
368 creation for a new weakref object for an referent which already
369 has a weakref without a callback which is only referenced from
370 cyclic trash, a memory error can occur. This consistently created a
371 segfault in a debug build, but provided less predictable behavior in
372 a release build.
373
Hye-Shik Changff83c2b2004-02-02 13:39:01 +0000374- input() builtin function now respects compiler flags such as
375 __future__ statements. SF patch 876178.
376
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000377- Removed PendingDeprecationWarning from apply(). apply() remains
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000378 deprecated, but the nuisance warning will not be issued.
Fred Drake713ade62003-12-05 17:43:47 +0000379
Tim Peters1d7323e2003-12-01 21:35:27 +0000380- At Python shutdown time (Py_Finalize()), 2.3 called cyclic garbage
381 collection twice, both before and after tearing down modules. The
382 call after tearing down modules has been disabled, because too much
383 of Python has been torn down then for __del__ methods and weakref
384 callbacks to execute sanely. The most common symptom was a sequence
385 of uninformative messages on stderr when Python shut down, produced
386 by threads trying to raise exceptions, but unable to report the nature
387 of their problems because too much of the sys module had already been
388 destroyed.
389
Guido van Rossum6c9e1302003-11-29 23:52:13 +0000390- Removed FutureWarnings related to hex/oct literals and conversions
391 and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
392 This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
393 PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
394 'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
395 changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
396 implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
397 hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
398
Raymond Hettinger4f8f9762003-11-26 08:21:35 +0000399- For str and unicode objects, the ljust(), center(), and rjust()
400 methods now accept an optional argument specifying a fill
401 character other than a space.
402
Guido van Rossumbaf0f8f2003-11-22 23:55:50 +0000403- When method objects have an attribute that can be satisfied either
404 by the function object or by the method object, the function
405 object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
406 that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
407 methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
408 really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
409 on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
410 attributes with the same name.
411
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000412- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 839548: if a weakref with a callback,
413 its callback, and its weakly referenced object, all became part of
414 cyclic garbage during a single run of garbage collection, the order
415 in which they were torn down was unpredictable. It was possible for
416 the callback to see partially-torn-down objects, leading to immediate
417 segfaults, or, if the callback resurrected garbage objects, to
418 resurrect insane objects that caused segfaults (or other surprises)
419 later. In one sense this wasn't surprising, because Python's cyclic gc
420 had no knowledge of Python's weakref objects. It does now. When
421 weakrefs with callbacks become part of cyclic garbage now, those
422 weakrefs are cleared first. The callbacks don't trigger then,
423 preventing the problems. If you need callbacks to trigger, then just
424 as when cyclic gc is not involved, you need to write your code so
425 that weakref objects outlive the objects they weakly reference.
Raymond Hettingera690a992003-11-16 16:17:49 +0000426
Tim Petersadd09b42003-11-12 20:43:28 +0000427- Critical bugfix, for SF bug 840829: if cyclic garbage collection
428 happened to occur during a weakref callback for a new-style class
429 instance, subtle memory corruption was the result (in a release build;
430 in a debug build, a segfault occurred reliably very soon after).
431 This has been repaired.
432
Tim Peters403a2032003-11-20 21:21:46 +0000433- Compiler flags set in PYTHONSTARTUP are now active in __main__.
434
435- Added two builtin types, set() and frozenset().
436
Raymond Hettinger85c20a42003-11-06 14:06:48 +0000437- Added a reversed() builtin function that returns a reverse iterator
438 over a sequence.
439
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000440- Added a sorted() builtin function that returns a new sorted list
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000441 from any iterable.
Raymond Hettinger64958a12003-12-17 20:43:33 +0000442
Martin v. Löwis01a74b22003-10-19 18:30:01 +0000443- CObjects are now mutable (on the C level) through PyCObject_SetVoidPtr.
444
Raymond Hettinger42b1ba32003-10-16 03:41:09 +0000445- list.sort() now supports three keyword arguments: cmp, key, and reverse.
446 The key argument can be a function of one argument that extracts a
447 comparison key from the original record: mylist.sort(key=str.lower).
448 The reverse argument is a boolean value and if True will change the
449 sort order as if the comparison arguments were reversed. In addition,
450 the documentation has been amended to provide a guarantee that all sorts
451 starting with Py2.3 are guaranteed to be stable (the relative order of
452 records with equal keys is unchanged).
453
Marc-André Lemburgd7160f82003-09-22 11:14:40 +0000454- Added test whether wchar_t is signed or not. A signed wchar_t is not
455 usable as internal unicode type base for Py_UNICODE since the
456 unicode implementation assumes an unsigned type.
457
Jeremy Hyltond8082792003-09-16 19:41:39 +0000458- Fixed a bug in the cache of length-one Unicode strings that could
459 lead to a seg fault. The specific problem occurred when an earlier,
460 non-fatal error left an uninitialized Unicode object in the
461 freelist.
462
Raymond Hettinger9bfe5332003-08-27 04:55:52 +0000463- The % formatting operator now supports '%F' which is equivalent to
464 '%f'. This has always been documented but never implemented.
465
Tim Peters465fa3d2003-08-15 01:16:37 +0000466- complex(obj) could leak a little memory if obj wasn't a string or
467 number.
468
Raymond Hettingereaef6152003-08-02 07:42:57 +0000469- zip() with no arguments now returns an empty list instead of raising
470 a TypeError exception.
471
Guido van Rossum02c58f82003-10-08 21:08:29 +0000472- obj.__contains__() now returns True/False instead of 1/0. SF patch
473 820195.
474
Armin Rigo2b3eb402003-10-28 12:05:48 +0000475- Python no longer tries to be smart about recursive comparisons.
476 When comparing containers with cyclic references to themselves it
477 will now just hit the recursion limit. See SF patch 825639.
478
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000479- str and unicode builtin types now have an rsplit() method that is
Raymond Hettingerc0d49d82003-12-15 19:24:34 +0000480 same as split() except that it scans the string from the end
481 working towards the beginning. See SF feature request 801847.
Hye-Shik Chang060ebed2003-12-15 18:51:19 +0000482
Jim Fulton8a1a5942004-02-08 04:21:26 +0000483- Fixed a bug in object.__reduce_ex__ when using protocol 2. Failure
484 to clear the error when attempts to get the __getstate__ attribute
485 fail caused intermittent errors and odd behavior.
486
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000487- buffer objects based on other objects no longer cache a pointer to
488 the data and the data length. Instead, the appropriate tp_as_buffer
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000489 method is called as necessary.
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000490
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000491- fixed: if a file is opened with an explicit buffer size >= 1, repeated
Andrew MacIntyre4e10ed32004-04-04 07:01:35 +0000492 close() calls would attempt to free() the buffer already free()ed on
493 the first call.
494
Neil Schemenauer4252a7a2004-03-11 02:42:45 +0000495
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000496Extension modules
497-----------------
498
Barry Warsaw11b91a02004-06-28 00:50:43 +0000499- Added socket.getservbyport(), and make the second argument in
500 getservbyname() and getservbyport() optional.
501
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000502- time module code that deals with input POSIX timestamps will now raise
503 ValueError if more than a second is lost in precision when the
504 timestamp is cast to the platform C time_t type. There's no chance
505 that the platform will do anything sensible with the result in such
506 cases. This includes ctime(), localtime() and gmtime(). Assorted
507 fromtimestamp() and utcfromtimestamp() methods in the datetime module
508 were also protected. Closes bugs #919012 and 975996.
Brett Cannonb46ed712004-06-19 20:50:47 +0000509
Martin v. Löwis77ca6c42004-06-03 12:47:26 +0000510- fcntl.ioctl now warns if the mutate flag is not specified.
511
Martin v. Löwisd8948722004-06-02 09:57:56 +0000512- nt now properly allows to refer to UNC roots, e.g. in nt.stat().
513
Raymond Hettinger027bb632004-05-31 03:09:25 +0000514- the weakref module now supports additional objects: array.array,
515 sre.pattern_objects, file objects, and sockets.
516
Raymond Hettingere2eda602004-04-04 08:51:41 +0000517- operator.isMappingType() and operator.isSequenceType() now give
518 fewer false positives.
519
Brett Cannon06c34792004-03-23 23:16:54 +0000520- socket.sslerror is now a subclass of socket.error . Also added
521 socket.error to the socket module's C API.
522
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000523- Bug #920575: A problem where the _locale module segfaults on
Hye-Shik Changc3a87b82004-03-21 19:34:30 +0000524 nl_langinfo(ERA) caused by GNU libc's illegal NULL return is fixed.
525
Raymond Hettinger6e2ee862004-03-14 04:37:50 +0000526- array objects now support the copy module. Also, their resizing
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000527 scheme has been updated to match that used for list objects. This improves
Raymond Hettinger49f9bd12004-03-14 05:43:59 +0000528 the performance (speed and memory usage) of append() operations.
529 Also, array.extend() now accepts any iterable argument for repeated
530 appends without needing to create another temporary array.
Raymond Hettinger3aa82c02004-03-13 18:18:51 +0000531
Raymond Hettinger3e47f652004-03-08 18:22:35 +0000532- cStringIO.writelines() now accepts any iterable argument and writes
533 the lines one at a time rather than joining them and writing once.
534 Made a parallel change to StringIO.writelines(). Saves memory and
535 makes suitable for use with generator expressions.
536
Brett Cannond1080a32004-03-02 04:38:10 +0000537- time.strftime() now checks that the values in its time tuple argument
538 are within the proper boundaries to prevent possible crashes from the
539 platform's C library implementation of strftime(). Can possibly
540 break code that uses values outside the range that didn't cause
541 problems previously (such as sitting day of year to 0). Fixes bug
542 #897625.
543
Martin v. Löwis12af0482004-01-31 12:34:17 +0000544- The socket module now supports Bluetooth sockets, if the
545 system has <bluetooth/bluetooth.h>
546
Raymond Hettinger756b3f32004-01-29 06:37:52 +0000547- Added a collections module containing a new datatype, deque(),
548 offering high-performance, thread-safe, memory friendly appends
549 and pops on either side of the deque.
550
551- Several modules now take advantage of collections.deque() for
552 improved performance: Queue, mutex, shlex, threading, and pydoc.
553
Raymond Hettinger166958b2003-12-01 13:18:39 +0000554- The operator module has two new functions, attrgetter() and
555 itemgetter() which are useful for creating fast data extractor
556 functions for map(), list.sort(), itertools.groupby(), and
557 other functions that expect a function argument.
558
Martin v. Löwis94681fc2003-11-27 19:40:22 +0000559- socket.SHUT_{RD,WR,RDWR} was added.
560
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000561- os.getsid was added.
562
Guido van Rossum16b9fa82003-10-23 23:54:57 +0000563- The pwd module incorrectly advertised its struct type as
564 struct_pwent; this has been renamed to struct_passwd. (The old name
565 is still supported for backwards compatibility.)
566
Fred Drakede050322003-10-21 15:41:59 +0000567- The xml.parsers.expat module now provides Expat 1.95.7.
568
Martin v. Löwis3bbd6542003-10-03 13:57:37 +0000569- socket.IPPROTO_IPV6 was added.
570
Martin v. Löwise7a97962003-09-20 16:08:33 +0000571- readline.clear_history was added.
572
Brett Cannon62dba4c2003-09-10 19:37:42 +0000573- select.select() now accepts sequences for its first three arguments.
574
Raymond Hettinger5475f232003-08-08 12:20:03 +0000575- cStringIO now supports the f.closed attribute.
576
Anthony Baxter83f52912003-08-05 06:33:56 +0000577- The signal module now exposes SIGRTMIN and SIGRTMAX (if available).
578
Andrew M. Kuchling69f31eb2003-08-13 23:11:04 +0000579- curses module now supports use_default_colors(). [patch #739124]
580
Anthony Baxter5c68ef02003-10-04 08:04:04 +0000581- Bug #811028: ncurses.h breakage on FreeBSD/MacOS X
582
583- Bug #814613: INET_ADDRSTRLEN fix needed for all compilers on SGI
584
Gustavo Niemeyerad3fc442003-10-17 22:13:16 +0000585- Implemented non-recursive SRE matching scheme (#757624).
586
587- Implemented (?(id/name)yes|no) support in SRE (#572936).
588
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000589- random.seed() with no arguments or None uses time.time() as a default
590 seed. Modified to match Py2.2 behavior and use fractional seconds so
591 that successive runs are more likely to produce different sequences.
592
593- random.Random has a new method, getrandbits(k), which returns an int
594 with k random bits. This method is now an optional part of the API
595 for user defined generators. Any generator that defines genrandbits()
596 can now use randrange() for ranges with a length >= 2**53. Formerly,
597 randrange would return only even numbers for ranges that large (see
598 SF bug #812202). Generators that do not define genrandbits() now
599 issue a warning when randrange() is called with a range that large.
600
Raymond Hettingerd25c1c62003-12-06 16:23:06 +0000601- itertools has a new function, groupby() for aggregating iterables
602 into groups sharing the same key (as determined by a key function).
603 It offers some of functionality of SQL's groupby keyword and of
604 the Unix uniq filter.
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000605
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000606- itertools now has a new tee() function which produces two independent
Raymond Hettinger6a5b0272003-10-24 08:45:23 +0000607 iterators from a single iterable.
608
609- itertools.izip() with no arguments now returns an empty iterator instead
610 of raising a TypeError exception.
611
Gustavo Niemeyera6e436e2004-02-14 00:02:45 +0000612- Fixed #853061: allow BZ2Compressor.compress() to receive an empty string
613 as parameter.
614
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000615Library
616-------
Tim Peters183dabc2004-07-11 19:26:19 +0000617
Guido van Rossum5124b4a2004-07-06 17:52:32 +0000618- Bug #981530: Fix UnboundLocalError in shutil.rmtree(). This affects
619 the documented behavior: the function passed to the onerror()
620 handler can now also be os.listdir.
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000621
Brett Cannon41d13f62004-07-03 03:54:54 +0000622- Bug #754449: threading.Thread objects no longer mask exceptions raised during
623 interpreter shutdown with another exception from attempting to handle the
624 original exception.
Brett Cannoncc4e9352004-07-03 03:52:35 +0000625
Raymond Hettinger21f9fce2004-07-10 16:11:03 +0000626- Added decimal.py per PEP 327.
Raymond Hettinger7c85fa42004-07-01 11:01:35 +0000627
Brett Cannon46d4ff22004-06-29 04:08:23 +0000628- Bug #981299: rsync is now a recognized protocol in urlparse that uses a
629 "netloc" portion of a URL.
Brett Cannonfbac2942004-06-29 04:02:40 +0000630
Brett Cannon1c3fa182004-06-19 21:11:35 +0000631- Bug #919012: shutil.move() will not try to move a directory into itself.
632 Thanks Johannes Gijsbers.
633
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000634- Bug #934282: pydoc.stripid() is now case-insensitive. Thanks Robin Becker.
635
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000636- Bug #823209: cmath.log() now takes an optional base argument so that its
Brett Cannonc6c1f472004-06-19 01:02:51 +0000637 API matches math.log().
Raymond Hettingerb67ad7e2004-06-14 07:40:10 +0000638
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000639- Bug #957381: distutils bdist_rpm no longer fails on recent RPM versions
640 that generate a *-debuginfo.rpm.
641
Martin v. Löwisbdec50f2004-06-08 08:29:33 +0000642- os.path.devnull has been added for all supported platforms.
643
Hye-Shik Chang2400e932004-06-05 18:37:53 +0000644- Fixed #877165: distutils now picks the right C++ compiler command
645 on cygwin and mingw32.
646
Hye-Shik Chang39aef792004-06-05 13:30:56 +0000647- urllib.urlopen().readline() now handles HTTP/0.9 correctly.
648
Brett Cannon0096e262004-06-05 01:12:51 +0000649- refactored site.py into functions. Also wrote regression tests for the
650 module.
651
Fred Drakeec6229e2004-06-25 23:02:59 +0000652- The distutils install command now supports the --home option and
653 installation scheme for all platforms.
654
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000655- asyncore.loop now has a repeat count parameter that defaults to
Michael W. Hudson7db865a2004-06-30 09:09:38 +0000656 looping forever.
Michael W. Hudsonc30ba842004-06-30 09:06:29 +0000657
Tim Peters2f50e902004-05-31 19:27:59 +0000658- The distutils sdist command now ignores all .svn directories, in
659 addition to CVS and RCS directories. .svn directories hold
660 administrative files for the Subversion source control system.
661
Martin v. Löwis2a6ba902004-05-31 18:22:40 +0000662- Added a new module: cookielib. Automatic cookie handling for HTTP
663 clients. Also, support for cookielib has been added to urllib2, so
664 urllib2.urlopen() can transparently handle cookies.
665
Raymond Hettinger059e1702004-05-19 19:56:44 +0000666- stringprep.py now uses built-in set() instead of sets.Set().
667
Thomas Heller2e7c8322004-05-11 15:10:59 +0000668- Bug #876278: Unbounded recursion in modulefinder
669
Martin v. Löwis456ab1d2004-05-06 01:54:36 +0000670- Bug #780300: Swap public and system ID in LexicalHandler.startDTD.
671 Applications relying on the wrong order need to be corrected.
672
Hye-Shik Chang0f5bf1e2004-04-20 21:11:11 +0000673- Bug #926075: Fixed a bug that returns a wrong pattern object
674 for a string or unicode object in sre.compile() when a different
675 type pattern with the same value exists.
676
Skip Montanarod0c0c412004-04-07 16:03:02 +0000677- Added countcallers arg to trace.Trace class (--trackcalls command line arg
678 when run from the command prompt).
679
Brett Cannon21beb4c2004-03-25 16:55:12 +0000680- Fixed a caching bug in platform.platform() where the argument of 'terse' was
681 not taken into consideration when caching value.
682
Nicholas Bastin824b1b22004-03-23 18:44:39 +0000683- Added two new command-line arguments for profile (output file and
684 default sort).
685
Nicholas Bastin1eb4bfc2004-03-22 20:12:56 +0000686- Added global runctx function to profile module
687
Martin v. Löwis347c30d2004-03-21 15:29:41 +0000688- Add hlist missing entryconfigure and entrycget methods.
689
Hye-Shik Chang4a7ad1a2004-03-19 08:11:56 +0000690- The ptcp154 codec was added for Kazakh character set support.
691
Martin v. Löwisa79449e2004-02-15 21:19:18 +0000692- Support non-anonymous ftp URLs in urllib2.
693
Andrew M. Kuchling81e3fb42004-07-04 15:41:59 +0000694- The encodings package will now apply codec name aliases
Marc-André Lemburg57cb68f2004-01-20 18:24:34 +0000695 first before starting to try the import of the codec module.
696 This simplifies overriding built-in codecs with external
697 packages, e.g. the included CJK codecs with the JapaneseCodecs
698 package, by adjusting the aliases dictionary in encodings.aliases
699 accordingly.
700
Barry Warsaw30ff12f2004-01-04 01:13:43 +0000701- base64 now supports RFC 3548 Base16, Base32, and Base64 encoding and
702 decoding standards.
703
Jeremy Hylton37c5f2a2003-12-14 05:29:45 +0000704- urllib2 now supports processors. A processor is a handler that
705 implements an xxx_request or xxx_response method. These methods are
706 called for all requests.
707
Thomas Hellerc7501d52003-12-05 20:28:07 +0000708- distutils compilers now compile source files in the same order as
709 they are passed to the compiler.
710
Walter Dörwaldc8de4582003-12-03 20:26:05 +0000711- pprint.pprint() and pprint.pformat() now have additional parameters
712 indent, width and depth.
713
Walter Dörwald7a7ede52003-12-03 20:15:28 +0000714- Patch #750542: pprint now will pretty print subclasses of list, tuple
715 and dict too, as long as they don't overwrite __repr__().
716
Thomas Hellerb3105912003-11-28 19:42:56 +0000717- Bug #848614: distutils' msvccompiler fails to find the MSVC6
718 compiler because of incomplete registry entries.
719
Martin v. Löwisaf7dc8d2003-11-19 19:51:55 +0000720- httplib.HTTP.putrequest now offers to omit the implicit Accept-Encoding.
721
Thomas Hellercf0005b2003-11-14 10:33:20 +0000722- Patch #841977: modulefinder didn't find extension modules in packages
723
Martin v. Löwisd8921372003-11-10 06:44:44 +0000724- imaplib.IMAP4.thread was added.
725
Guido van Rossum967b0632003-11-10 02:27:19 +0000726- Plugged a minor hole in tempfile.mktemp() due to the use of
727 os.path.exists(), switched to using os.lstat() directly if possible.
728
Raymond Hettinger0c410272004-01-05 10:13:35 +0000729- bisect.py and heapq.py now have underlying C implementations
Raymond Hettinger33ecffb2004-06-10 05:03:17 +0000730 for better performance.
731
Anthony Baxterc982bbd2004-06-11 17:16:46 +0000732- heapq.py has two new functions, nsmallest() and nlargest().
Raymond Hettingerb3af1812003-11-08 10:24:38 +0000733
Neil Schemenauerf607fc52003-11-05 23:03:00 +0000734- traceback.format_exc has been added (similar to print_exc but it returns
735 a string).
736
Martin v. Löwis45394c22003-10-31 13:49:36 +0000737- xmlrpclib.MultiCall has been added.
738
Martin v. Löwis48440b72003-10-31 12:52:35 +0000739- poplib.POP3_SSL has been added.
740
Martin v. Löwisd6625482003-10-12 17:37:01 +0000741- tmpfile.mkstemp now returns an absolute path even if dir is relative.
742
Brett Cannon5d9ca4e2003-10-12 04:38:48 +0000743- urlparse is RFC 2396 compliant.
744
Skip Montanarodef99342003-10-03 14:07:07 +0000745- The fieldnames argument to the csv module's DictReader constructor is now
746 optional. If omitted, the first row of the file will be used as the
747 list of fieldnames.
748
Raymond Hettinger9a80c5d2003-09-23 20:21:01 +0000749- encodings.bz2_codec was added for access to bz2 compression
750 using "a long string".encode('bz2')
751
Guido van Rossum0e5a51d2003-09-22 15:03:11 +0000752- Various improvements to unittest.py, realigned with PyUnit CVS.
753
Martin v. Löwisc6bb6c02003-09-20 15:52:21 +0000754- dircache now passes exceptions to the caller, instead of returning
755 empty lists.
756
Raymond Hettingerdeadbf52003-09-12 06:33:37 +0000757- The bsddb module and dbhash module now support the iterator and
758 mapping protocols which make them more substitutable for dictionaries
759 and shelves.
760
Skip Montanaro3f7a9482003-09-06 19:52:12 +0000761- The csv module's DictReader and DictWriter classes now accept keyword
762 arguments. This was an omission in the initial implementation.
763
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000764- The email package handles some RFC 2231 parameters with missing
Barry Warsaw2f5bf172003-09-03 04:09:49 +0000765 CHARSET fields better. It also includes a patch to parameter
766 parsing when semicolons appear inside quotes.
Barry Warsawd24a2a42003-08-19 03:59:09 +0000767
Raymond Hettinger6a180122003-08-17 08:34:09 +0000768- sets.py now runs under Py2.2. In addition, the argument restrictions
769 for most set methods (but not the operators) have been relaxed to
Raymond Hettinger70b9f492003-11-19 15:52:14 +0000770 allow any iterable.
Raymond Hettingeree562fc2003-08-15 21:17:04 +0000771
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000772- _strptime.py now has a behind-the-scenes caching mechanism for the most
Brett Cannonb7150a22003-08-05 06:27:04 +0000773 recent TimeRE instance used along with the last five unique directive
774 patterns. The overall module was also made more thread-safe.
775
Raymond Hettingerbeb35f42003-08-05 12:32:41 +0000776- random.cunifvariate() and random.stdgamma() were deprecated in Py2.3
777 and removed in Py2.4.
778
Anthony Baxter92bee362003-11-04 14:35:49 +0000779- Bug #823328: urllib2.py's HTTP Digest Auth support works again.
780
Hye-Shik Chang84a99312004-01-17 14:59:36 +0000781- Patch #873597: CJK codecs are imported into rank of default codecs.
782
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000783Tools/Demos
784-----------
785
Skip Montanarod5a21fd2004-01-27 14:49:04 +0000786- A hotshotmain script was added to the Tools/scripts directory that
787 makes it easy to run a script under control of the hotshot profiler.
788
Skip Montanaro030f68a2003-10-28 16:24:00 +0000789- The db2pickle and pickle2db scripts can now dump/load gdbm files.
790
Skip Montanaroe2b61e02004-03-03 17:42:08 +0000791- The file order on the command line of the pickle2db script was reversed.
792 It is now [ picklefile ] dbfile. This provides better symmetry with
793 db2pickle. The file arguments to both scripts are now source followed by
794 destination in situations where both files are given.
795
Skip Montanarofd4fa882003-09-10 19:04:13 +0000796- The pydoc script will display a link to the module documentation for
797 modules determined to be part of the core distribution. The documentation
798 base directory defaults to http://www.python.org/doc/current/lib/ but can
799 be changed by setting the PYTHONDOCS environment variable.
800
Raymond Hettingere41d4c82003-08-25 04:39:55 +0000801- texcheck.py now detects double word errors.
802
Tim Peters1a3abcb2003-08-18 23:52:09 +0000803- md5sum.py mistakenly opened input files in text mode by default, a
804 silent and dangerous change from previous releases. It once again
805 opens input files in binary mode by default. The -t and -b flags
806 remain for compatibility with the 2.3 release, but -b is the default
807 now.
808
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000809- py-electric-colon now works when pending-delete/delete-selection mode is
810 in effect
811
812- py-help-at-point is no longer bound to the F1 key - it's still bound to
813 C-c C-h
814
Barry Warsaw6ec58ca2003-09-03 03:20:37 +0000815- Pynche was fixed to not crash when there is no ~/.pynche file and no
816 -d option was given.
817
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000818Build
819-----
820
Brett Cannonf6af76d2004-06-26 04:03:06 +0000821- Bug #978645: Modules/getpath.c now builds properly in --disable-framework
822 build under OS X.
823
Skip Montanaro56f6a4f2004-06-18 02:47:22 +0000824- Profiling using gprof is now available if Python is configured with
825 --enable-profiling.
826
Martin v. Löwisf30d60e2004-06-08 08:17:44 +0000827- Profiling the VM using the Pentium TSC is now possible if Python
828 is configured --with-tsc.
829
Martin v. Löwis642c8a12004-06-04 13:55:13 +0000830- In order to find libraries, setup.py now also looks in /lib64, for use
831 on AMD64.
832
Hye-Shik Chang54f94392004-04-14 07:55:31 +0000833- Bug #934635: Fixed a bug where the configure script couldn't detect
834 getaddrinfo() properly if the KAME stack had SCTP support.
835
Skip Montanaro7befb992004-02-10 16:50:21 +0000836- Support for missing ANSI C header files (limits.h, stddef.h, etc) was
837 removed.
838
Skip Montanarodb608052004-02-07 13:53:46 +0000839- Systems requiring the D4, D6 or D7 variants of pthreads are no longer
840 supported (see PEP 11).
841
842- Universal newline support can no longer be disabled (see PEP 11).
843
Skip Montanarocd1f7432004-01-17 14:22:44 +0000844- Support for DGUX, SunOS 4, IRIX 4 and Minix was removed (see PEP 11).
845
846- Support for systems requiring --with-dl-dld or --with-sgi-dl was removed
847 (see PEP 11).
848
849- Tests for sizeof(char) were removed since ANSI C mandates that
850 sizeof(char) must be 1.
851
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000852C API
853-----
854
Tim Peters9ddf40b2004-06-20 22:41:32 +0000855- Thanks to Anthony Tuininga, the datetime module now supplies a C API
856 containing type-check macros and constructors. See new docs in the
857 Python/C API Reference Manual for details.
858
Tim Peters1b6f7a92004-06-20 02:50:16 +0000859- Private function _PyTime_DoubleToTimet added, to convert a Python
860 timestamp (C double) to platform time_t with some out-of-bounds
861 checking. Declared in new header file timefuncs.h. It would be
862 good to expose some other internal timemodule.c functions there.
863
Martin v. Löwise440e472004-06-01 15:22:42 +0000864- New public functions PyEval_EvaluateFrame and PyGen_New to expose
865 generator objects.
866
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000867- New public functions Py_IncRef() and Py_DecRef(), exposing the
868 functionality of the Py_XINCREF() and Py_XDECREF macros. Useful for
Thomas Hellercc10a852004-04-22 17:28:25 +0000869 runtime dynamic embedding of Python. See patch #938302, by Bob
870 Ippolito.
Thomas Heller1328b522004-04-22 17:23:49 +0000871
Raymond Hettingerc1e4f9d2004-03-12 08:04:00 +0000872- Added a new macro, PySequence_Fast_ITEMS, which retrieves a fast sequence's
873 underlying array of PyObject pointers. Useful for high speed looping.
874
Raymond Hettinger8f5cdaa2003-12-13 11:26:12 +0000875- Created a new method flag, METH_COEXIST, which causes a method to be loaded
876 even if already defined by a slot wrapper. This allows a __contains__
877 method, for example, to co-exist with a defined sq_contains slot. This
878 is helpful because the PyCFunction can take advantage of optimized calls
879 whenever METH_O or METH_NOARGS flags are defined.
880
Raymond Hettingerbc0f2ab2003-11-25 21:12:14 +0000881- Added a new function, PyDict_Contains(d, k) which is like
882 PySequence_Contains() but is specific to dictionaries and executes
883 about 10% faster.
884
Brett Cannon26b3a7b2003-10-19 21:31:43 +0000885- Added three new macros: Py_RETURN_NONE, Py_RETURN_TRUE, and Py_RETURN_FALSE.
886 Each return the singleton they mention after Py_INCREF()ing them.
887
Raymond Hettingercb2da432003-10-12 18:24:34 +0000888- Added a new function, PyTuple_Pack(n, ...) for constructing tuples from a
889 variable length argument list of Python objects without having to invoke
890 the more complex machinery of Py_BuildValue(). PyTuple_Pack(3, a, b, c)
891 is equivalent to Py_BuildValue("(OOO)", a, b, c).
892
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000893Windows
894-------
895
Guido van Rossumfd25aca2003-11-30 22:10:15 +0000896- The _winreg module could segfault when reading very large registry
897 values, due to unchecked alloca() calls (SF bug 851056). The fix is
898 uses either PyMem_Malloc(n) or PyString_FromStringAndSize(NULL, n),
899 as appropriate, followed by a size check.
900
Tim Petersf1827cf2003-09-07 03:30:18 +0000901- file.truncate() could misbehave if the file was open for update
902 (modes r+, rb+, w+, wb+), and the most recent file operation before
903 the truncate() call was an input operation. SF bug 801631.
904
Skip Montanarocb3988c2003-08-01 05:01:54 +0000905
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000906What's New in Python 2.3 final?
907===============================
908
909*Release date: 29-Jul-2003*
910
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000911IDLE
912----
913
Tim Peters36c1afc2003-07-29 17:22:57 +0000914- Bug 778400: IDLE hangs when selecting "Edit with IDLE" from explorer.
915 This was unique to Windows, and was fixed by adding an -n switch to
916 the command the Windows installer creates to execute "Edit with IDLE"
917 context-menu actions.
918
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000919- IDLE displays a new message upon startup: some "personal firewall"
920 kinds of programs (for example, ZoneAlarm) open a dialog of their
921 own when any program opens a socket. IDLE does use sockets, talking
922 on the computer's internal loopback interface. This connection is not
923 visible on any external interface and no data is sent to or received
924 from the Internet. So, if you get such a dialog when opening IDLE,
925 asking whether to let pythonw.exe talk to address 127.0.0.1, say yes,
926 and rest assured no communication external to your machine is taking
927 place. If you don't allow it, IDLE won't be able to start.
928
Tim Peters09638032003-07-29 00:10:29 +0000929
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000930What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 2?
931=============================================
932
Tim Peters6560a252003-07-24 00:15:46 +0000933*Release date: 24-Jul-2003*
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000934
935Core and builtins
936-----------------
937
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000938- It is now possible to import from zipfiles containing additional
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000939 data bytes before the zip compatible archive. Zipfiles containing a
Thomas Heller354e3d92003-07-22 18:10:15 +0000940 comment at the end are still unsupported.
941
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000942Extension modules
943-----------------
944
945- A longstanding bug in the parser module's initialization could cause
946 fatal internal refcount confusion when the module got initialized more
947 than once. This has been fixed.
948
Fred Drake01a43122003-07-21 17:17:10 +0000949- Fixed memory leak in pyexpat; using the parser's ParseFile() method
950 with open files that aren't instances of the standard file type
951 caused an instance of the bound .read() method to be leaked on every
952 call.
953
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000954- Fixed some leaks in the locale module.
955
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000956Library
957-------
958
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000959- Lib/encodings/rot_13.py when used as a script, now more properly
960 uses the first Python interpreter on your path.
961
962- Removed caching of TimeRE (and thus LocaleTime) in _strptime.py to
963 fix a locale related bug in the test suite. Although another patch
964 was needed to actually fix the problem, the cache code was not
965 restored.
966
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000967IDLE
968----
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000969
Tim Petersc794a1c2003-07-27 20:23:49 +0000970- Calltips patches.
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000971
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000972Build
973-----
974
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000975- For MacOSX, added -mno-fused-madd to BASECFLAGS to fix test_coercion
976 on Panther (OSX 10.3).
977
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000978C API
979-----
980
981Windows
982-------
983
Tim Peters291f14e2003-07-22 02:50:01 +0000984- The tempfile module could do insane imports on Windows if PYTHONCASEOK
985 was set, making temp file creation impossible. Repaired.
986
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000987- Add a patch to workaround pthread_sigmask() bugs in Cygwin.
988
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000989Mac
990---
991
Barry Warsaw0517c9a2003-07-25 01:09:40 +0000992- Various fixes to pimp.
993
994- Scripts runs with pythonw no longer had full window manager access.
995
996- Don't force boot-disk-only install, for reasons unknown it causes
997 more problems than it solves.
998
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +0000999
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001000What's New in Python 2.3 release candidate 1?
1001=============================================
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001002
Jeremy Hylton0ed18c22003-07-18 20:10:02 +00001003*Release date: 18-Jul-2003*
1004
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001005Core and builtins
1006-----------------
1007
Tim Peterse5e065b2003-07-06 18:36:54 +00001008- The new function sys.getcheckinterval() returns the last value set
1009 by sys.setcheckinterval().
1010
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001011- Several bugs in the symbol table phase of the compiler have been
1012 fixed. Errors could be lost and compilation could fail without
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001013 reporting an error. SF patch 763201.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001014
1015- The interpreter is now more robust about importing the warnings
1016 module. In an executable generated by freeze or similar programs,
1017 earlier versions of 2.3 would fail if the warnings module could
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001018 not be found on the file system. Fixes SF bug 771097.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001019
1020- A warning about assignments to module attributes that shadow
1021 builtins, present in earlier releases of 2.3, has been removed.
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001022
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001023- It is not possible to create subclasses of builtin types like str
1024 and tuple that define an itemsize. Earlier releases of Python 2.3
1025 allowed this by mistake, leading to crashes and other problems.
1026
1027- The thread_id is now initialized to 0 in a non-thread build. SF bug
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001028 770247.
1029
1030- SF bug 762891: "del p[key]" on proxy object no longer raises SystemError.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001031
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001032Extension modules
1033-----------------
1034
1035- weakref.proxy() can now handle "del obj[i]" for proxy objects
1036 defining __delitem__. Formerly, it generated a SystemError.
1037
1038- SSL no longer crashes the interpreter when the remote side disconnects.
1039
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001040- On Unix the mmap module can again be used to map device files.
1041
Brett Cannon20def8b2003-07-01 05:16:08 +00001042- time.strptime now exclusively uses the Python implementation
1043 contained within the _strptime module.
1044
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001045- The print slot of weakref proxy objects was removed, because it was
1046 not consistent with the object's repr slot.
1047
1048- The mmap module only checks file size for regular files, not
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001049 character or block devices. SF patch 708374.
1050
1051- The cPickle Pickler garbage collection support was fixed to traverse
1052 the find_class attribute, if present.
1053
Tim Peters6a627252003-07-21 14:25:23 +00001054- There are several fixes for the bsddb3 wrapper module.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001055
1056 bsddb3 no longer crashes if an environment is closed before a cursor
1057 (SF bug 763298).
1058
1059 The DB and DBEnv set_get_returns_none function was extended to take
Barry Warsawd71a5512003-07-20 18:00:54 +00001060 a level instead of a boolean flag. The new level 2 means that in
1061 addition, cursor.set()/.get() methods return None instead of raising
1062 an exception.
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001063
1064 A typo was fixed in DBCursor.join_item(), preventing a crash.
1065
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001066Library
1067-------
1068
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001069- distutils now supports MSVC 7.1
1070
Raymond Hettinger71adf7e2003-07-16 19:25:22 +00001071- doctest now examines all docstrings by default. Previously, it would
1072 skip over functions with private names (as indicated by the underscore
1073 naming convention). The old default created too much of a risk that
1074 user tests were being skipped inadvertently. Note, this change could
1075 break code in the unlikely case that someone had intentionally put
1076 failing tests in the docstrings of private functions. The breakage
1077 is easily fixable by specifying the old behavior when calling testmod()
1078 or Tester().
1079
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001080- There were several fixes to the way dumbdbms are closed. It's vital
1081 that a dumbdbm database be closed properly, else the on-disk data
1082 and directory files can be left in mutually inconsistent states.
1083 dumbdbm.py's _Database.__del__() method attempted to close the
1084 database properly, but a shutdown race in _Database._commit() could
1085 prevent this from working, so that a program trusting __del__() to
1086 get the on-disk files in synch could be badly surprised. The race
1087 has been repaired. A sync() method was also added so that shelve
1088 can guarantee data is written to disk.
Tim Peters7a6c7332003-07-13 17:21:10 +00001089
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001090 The close() method can now be called more than once without complaint.
Tim Petersd7472ec2003-07-13 02:22:03 +00001091
Tim Peters59aba122003-07-01 20:01:55 +00001092- The classes in threading.py are now new-style classes. That they
1093 weren't before was an oversight.
1094
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001095- The urllib2 digest authentication handlers now define the correct
1096 auth_header. The earlier versions would fail at runtime.
1097
Neal Norwitze7dfe212003-07-01 14:59:46 +00001098- SF bug 763023: fix uncaught ZeroDivisionError in difflib ratio methods
1099 when there are no lines.
1100
Neal Norwitz3c0f2c92003-07-01 21:12:47 +00001101- SF bug 763637: fix exception in Tkinter with after_cancel
1102 which could occur with Tk 8.4
1103
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001104- SF bug 770601: CGIHTTPServer.py now passes the entire environment
1105 to child processes.
1106
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001107- SF bug 765238: add filter to fnmatch's __all__.
1108
1109- SF bug 748201: make time.strptime() error messages more helpful.
1110
1111- SF patch 764470: Do not dump the args attribute of a Fault object in
1112 xmlrpclib.
1113
1114- SF patch 549151: urllib and urllib2 now redirect POSTs on 301
1115 responses.
1116
1117- SF patch 766650: The whichdb module was fixed to recognize dbm files
1118 generated by gdbm on OS/2 EMX.
1119
1120- SF bugs 763047 and 763052: fixes bug of timezone value being left as
1121 -1 when ``time.tzname[0] == time.tzname[1] and not time.daylight``
1122 is true when it should only when time.daylight is true.
1123
1124- SF bug 764548: re now allows subclasses of str and unicode to be
1125 used as patterns.
1126
1127- SF bug 763637: In Tkinter, change after_cancel() to handle tuples
1128 of varying sizes. Tk 8.4 returns a different number of values
1129 than Tk 8.3.
1130
1131- SF bug 763023: difflib.ratio() did not catch zero division.
1132
1133- The Queue module now has an __all__ attribute.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001134
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001135Tools/Demos
1136-----------
1137
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001138- See Lib/idlelib/NEWS.txt for IDLE news.
1139
Neal Norwitz592c4cc2003-07-01 04:14:28 +00001140- SF bug 753592: webchecker/wsgui now handles user supplied directories.
1141
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001142- The trace.py script has been removed. It is now in the standard library.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001143
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001144Build
1145-----
1146
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001147- Python now compiles with -fno-strict-aliasing if possible (SF bug 766696).
1148
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001149- The socket module compiles on IRIX 6.5.10.
1150
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001151- An irix64 system is treated the same way as an irix6 system (SF
1152 patch 764560).
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001153
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001154- Several definitions were missing on FreeBSD 5.x unless the
1155 __BSD_VISIBLE symbol was defined. configure now defines it as
1156 needed.
Jeremy Hyltonca9e21c2003-07-17 17:57:58 +00001157
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001158C API
1159-----
1160
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001161- Unicode objects now support mbcs as a built-in encoding, so the C
1162 API can use it without deferring to the encodings package.
1163
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001164Windows
1165-------
1166
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001167- The Windows implementation of PyThread_start_new_thread() never
1168 checked error returns from Windows functions correctly. As a result,
1169 it could claim to start a new thread even when the Microsoft
1170 _beginthread() function failed (due to "too many threads" -- this is
1171 on the order of thousands when it happens). In these cases, the
1172 Python exception ::
1173
1174 thread.error: can't start new thread
1175
1176 is raised now.
1177
1178- SF bug 766669: Prevent a GPF on interpreter exit when sockets are in
1179 use. The interpreter now calls WSACleanup() from Py_Finalize()
1180 instead of from DLL teardown.
1181
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001182Mac
1183---
1184
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001185- Bundlebuilder now inherits default values in the right way. It was
Walter Dörwald73a8a4b2003-07-30 12:14:02 +00001186 previously possible for app bundles to get a type of "BNDL" instead
Jeremy Hylton8aca4172003-07-17 19:19:05 +00001187 of "APPL." Other improvements include, a --build-id option to
1188 specify the CFBundleIdentifier and using the --python option to set
1189 the executable in the bundle.
1190
1191- Fixed two bugs in MacOSX framework handling.
Raymond Hettingerd693a812003-06-30 04:18:48 +00001192
Jack Jansene0040412003-07-23 22:17:28 +00001193- pythonw did not allow user interaction in 2.3rc1, this has been fixed.
1194
1195- Python is now compiled with -mno-fused-madd, making all tests pass
1196 on Panther.
1197
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001198What's New in Python 2.3 beta 2?
1199================================
1200
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001201*Release date: 29-Jun-2003*
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001202
1203Core and builtins
1204-----------------
1205
Barry Warsaw883f2232003-06-29 17:10:11 +00001206- A program can now set the environment variable PYTHONINSPECT to some
1207 string value in Python, and cause the interpreter to enter the
1208 interactive prompt at program exit, as if Python had been invoked
1209 with the -i option.
1210
Raymond Hettingerd05abde2003-06-17 05:05:49 +00001211- list.index() now accepts optional start and stop arguments. Similar
1212 changes were made to UserList.index(). SF feature request 754014.
1213
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001214- SF patch 751998 fixes an unwanted side effect of the previous fix
1215 for SF bug 742860 (the next item).
1216
Tim Peters50d8b8b2003-05-25 17:44:31 +00001217- SF bug 742860: "WeakKeyDictionary __delitem__ uses iterkeys". This
1218 wasn't threadsafe, was very inefficient (expected time O(len(dict))
1219 instead of O(1)), and could raise a spurious RuntimeError if another
1220 thread mutated the dict during __delitem__, or if a comparison function
1221 mutated it. It also neglected to raise KeyError when the key wasn't
1222 present; didn't raise TypeError when the key wasn't of a weakly
1223 referencable type; and broke various more-or-less obscure dict
1224 invariants by using a sequence of equality comparisons over the whole
1225 set of dict keys instead of computing the key's hash code to narrow
1226 the search to those keys with the same hash code. All of these are
1227 considered to be bugs. A new implementation of __delitem__ repairs all
1228 that, but note that fixing these bugs may change visible behavior in
1229 code relying (whether intentionally or accidentally) on old behavior.
Tim Peters886128f2003-05-25 01:45:11 +00001230
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001231- SF bug 734869: Fixed a compiler bug that caused a fatal error when
1232 compiling a list comprehension that contained another list comprehension
1233 embedded in a lambda expression.
1234
Tim Peterse87568d2003-05-24 20:18:24 +00001235- SF bug 705231: builtin pow() no longer lets the platform C pow()
1236 raise -1.0 to integer powers, because (at least) glibc gets it wrong
1237 in some cases. The result should be -1.0 if the power is odd and 1.0
1238 if the power is even, and any float with a sufficiently large exponent
1239 is (mathematically) an exact even integer.
1240
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001241- SF bug 759227: A new-style class that implements __nonzero__() must
1242 return a bool or int (but not an int subclass) from that method. This
1243 matches the restriction on classic classes.
1244
Martin v. Löwis5467d4c2003-05-10 07:10:12 +00001245- The encoding attribute has been added for file objects, and set to
1246 the terminal encoding on Unix and Windows.
1247
Tim Peters015dd822003-05-04 04:16:52 +00001248- The softspace attribute of file objects became read-only by oversight.
1249 It's writable again.
1250
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001251- Reverted a 2.3 beta 1 change to iterators for subclasses of list and
1252 tuple. By default, the iterators now access data elements directly
1253 instead of going through __getitem__. If __getitem__ access is
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001254 preferred, then __iter__ can be overridden.
Raymond Hettinger686b14d2003-05-07 01:28:47 +00001255
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001256- SF bug 735247: The staticmethod and super types participate in
1257 garbage collection. Before this change, it was possible for leaks to
1258 occur in functions with non-global free variables that used these types.
1259
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001260Extension modules
1261-----------------
1262
Raymond Hettinger643bcec2003-06-29 03:29:42 +00001263- the socket module has a new exception, socket.timeout, to allow
1264 timeouts to be handled separately from other socket errors.
1265
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001266- SF bug 751276: cPickle has fixed to propagate exceptions raised in
1267 user code. In earlier versions, cPickle caught and ignored any
1268 exception when it performed operations that it expected to raise
1269 specific exceptions like AttributeError.
1270
1271- cPickle Pickler and Unpickler objects now participate in garbage
1272 collection.
1273
Tim Peterscda32b72003-06-15 23:13:35 +00001274- mimetools.choose_boundary() could return duplicate strings at times,
1275 especially likely on Windows. The strings returned are now guaranteed
1276 unique within a single program run.
1277
Brett Cannon4e64d782003-06-13 23:44:35 +00001278- thread.interrupt_main() raises KeyboardInterrupt in the main thread.
1279 dummy_thread has also been modified to try to simulate the behavior.
1280
Walter Dörwald9e46abe2003-05-18 03:15:10 +00001281- array.array.insert() now treats negative indices as being relative
1282 to the end of the array, just like list.insert() does. (SF bug #739313)
1283
Tim Petersb0c854d2003-05-17 15:57:00 +00001284- The datetime module classes datetime, time, and timedelta are now
1285 properly subclassable.
Tim Petersa98924a2003-05-17 05:55:19 +00001286
Martin v. Löwis28e9ce92003-05-09 08:19:48 +00001287- _tkinter.{get|set}busywaitinterval was added.
1288
Raymond Hettinger834f4632003-05-02 20:24:56 +00001289- itertools.islice() now accepts stop=None as documented.
1290 Fixes SF bug #730685.
1291
Skip Montanaro8c044d82003-05-06 20:42:37 +00001292- the bsddb185 module is built in one restricted instance -
1293 /usr/include/db.h exists and defines HASHVERSION to be 2. This is true
1294 for many BSD-derived systems.
1295
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001296
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001297Library
1298-------
1299
Tim Petersdb3756d2003-06-29 05:30:48 +00001300- Some happy doctest extensions from Jim Fulton have been added to
1301 doctest.py. These are already being used in Zope3. The two
1302 primary ones:
1303
1304 doctest.debug(module, name) extracts the doctests from the named object
1305 in the given module, puts them in a temp file, and starts pdb running
1306 on that file. This is great when a doctest fails.
1307
1308 doctest.DocTestSuite(module=None) returns a synthesized unittest
1309 TestSuite instance, to be run by the unittest framework, which
1310 runs all the doctests in the module. This allows writing tests in
1311 doctest style (which can be clearer and shorter than writing tests
1312 in unittest style), without losing unittest's powerful testing
1313 framework features (which doctest lacks).
1314
Tim Peters6ebe61f2003-06-27 20:48:05 +00001315- For compatibility with doctests created before 2.3, if an expected
1316 output block consists solely of "1" and the actual output block
1317 consists solely of "True", it's accepted as a match; similarly
1318 for "0" and "False". This is quite un-doctest-like, but is practical.
1319 The behavior can be disabled by passing the new doctest module
1320 constant DONT_ACCEPT_TRUE_FOR_1 to the new optionflags optional
1321 argument.
1322
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001323- ZipFile.testzip() now only traps BadZipfile exceptions. Previously,
1324 a bare except caught to much and reported all errors as a problem
1325 in the archive.
1326
1327- The logging module now has a new function, makeLogRecord() making
1328 LogHandler easier to interact with DatagramHandler and SocketHandler.
1329
Skip Montanaro364ca402003-06-17 12:58:31 +00001330- The cgitb module has been extended to support plain text display (SF patch
1331 569574).
1332
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001333- A brand new version of IDLE (from the IDLEfork project at
1334 SourceForge) is now included as Lib/idlelib. The old Tools/idle is
1335 no more.
1336
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001337- Added a new module: trace (documentation missing). This module used
1338 to be distributed in Tools/scripts. It uses sys.settrace() to trace
1339 code execution -- either function calls or individual lines. It can
1340 generate tracing output during execution or a post-mortem report of
1341 code coverage.
1342
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001343- The threading module has new functions settrace() and setprofile()
1344 that cooperate with the functions of the same name in the sys
1345 module. A function registered with the threading module will
Jeremy Hyltonb752c272003-06-29 17:25:39 +00001346 be used for all threads it creates. The new trace module uses this
1347 to provide tracing for code running in threads.
Jeremy Hyltone0c31122003-06-16 20:38:15 +00001348
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001349- copy.py: applied SF patch 707900, fixing bug 702858, by Steven
1350 Taschuk. Copying a new-style class that had a reference to itself
1351 didn't work. (The same thing worked fine for old-style classes.)
Martin v. Löwisba8f5ff2003-06-14 07:10:06 +00001352 Builtin functions are now treated as atomic, fixing bug #746304.
Guido van Rossum99d2c252003-06-13 19:28:47 +00001353
Raymond Hettingerc24d7672003-06-08 19:42:33 +00001354- difflib.py has two new functions: context_diff() and unified_diff().
1355
Guido van Rossumfa19f7c2003-05-16 01:46:51 +00001356- More fixes to urllib (SF 549151): (a) When redirecting, always use
1357 GET. This is common practice and more-or-less sanctioned by the
1358 HTTP standard. (b) Add a handler for 307 redirection, which becomes
1359 an error for POST, but a regular redirect for GET and HEAD
1360
Guido van Rossumbf1bef82003-05-13 18:01:19 +00001361- Added optional 'onerror' argument to os.walk(), to control error
1362 handling.
1363
Martin v. Löwise59e2ba2003-05-03 09:09:02 +00001364- inspect.is{method|data}descriptor was added, to allow pydoc display
1365 __doc__ of data descriptors.
1366
Skip Montanaro4a7751c2003-04-29 21:07:16 +00001367- Fixed socket speed loss caused by use of the _socketobject wrapper class
1368 in socket.py.
1369
Raymond Hettinger22952a32003-05-20 04:59:56 +00001370- timeit.py now checks the current directory for imports.
1371
Gustavo Niemeyer9556fba2003-06-07 17:53:08 +00001372- urllib2.py now knows how to order proxy classes, so the user doesn't
1373 have to insert it in front of other classes, nor do dirty tricks like
1374 inserting a "dummy" HTTPHandler after a ProxyHandler when building an
1375 opener with proxy support.
1376
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001377- Iterators have been added for dbm keys.
1378
1379- random.Random objects can now be pickled.
1380
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001381Tools/Demos
1382-----------
1383
Martin v. Löwisb8c084e2003-06-14 09:03:46 +00001384- pydoc now offers help on keywords and topics.
1385
Guido van Rossumce74f8a2003-06-13 20:37:23 +00001386- Tools/idle is gone; long live Lib/idlelib.
1387
Tim Peters27409442003-06-29 16:18:08 +00001388- diff.py prints file diffs in context, unified, or ndiff formats,
1389 providing a command line interface to difflib.py.
Raymond Hettinger2f3c74a2003-06-08 23:10:15 +00001390
Raymond Hettinger71e00332003-05-10 03:30:13 +00001391- texcheck.py is a new script for making a rough validation of Python LaTeX
1392 files.
1393
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001394Build
1395-----
1396
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001397- Setting DESTDIR during 'make install' now allows specifying a
Martin v. Löwis3b8ee082003-05-11 20:25:35 +00001398 different root directory.
1399
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001400C API
1401-----
1402
Tim Peters3cfe7542003-05-21 21:29:48 +00001403- PyType_Ready(): If a type declares that it participates in gc
1404 (Py_TPFLAGS_HAVE_GC), and its base class does not, and its base class's
1405 tp_free slot is the default _PyObject_Del, and type does not define
1406 a tp_free slot itself, _PyObject_GC_Del is assigned to type->tp_free.
1407 Previously _PyObject_Del was inherited, which could at best lead to a
1408 segfault. In addition, if even after this magic the type's tp_free
1409 slot is _PyObject_Del or NULL, and the type is a base type
1410 (Py_TPFLAGS_BASETYPE), TypeError is raised: since the type is a base
1411 type, its dealloc function must call type->tp_free, and since the type
1412 is gc'able, tp_free must not be NULL or _PyObject_Del.
1413
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001414- PyThreadState_SetAsyncExc(): A new API (deliberately accessible only
1415 from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it an exception. It is
1416 intentional that you have to write your own C extension to call it
1417 from Python.
1418
1419
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001420New platforms
1421-------------
1422
1423None this time.
1424
1425Tests
1426-----
1427
1428- test_imp rewritten so that it doesn't raise RuntimeError if run as a
1429 side effect of being imported ("import test.autotest").
1430
1431Windows
1432-------
1433
Tim Petersfaa697a2003-06-22 01:42:20 +00001434- The Windows installer ships with Tcl/Tk 8.4.3 (upgraded from 8.4.1).
1435
Tim Petersc4607da2003-05-08 18:13:59 +00001436- The installer always suggested that Python be installed on the C:
1437 drive, due to a hardcoded "C:" generated by the Wise installation
1438 wizard. People with machines where C: is not the system drive
1439 usually want Python installed on whichever drive is their system drive
1440 instead. We removed the hardcoded "C:", and two testers on machines
1441 where C: is not the system drive report that the installer now
1442 suggests their system drive. Note that you can always select the
1443 directory you want in the "Select Destination Directory" dialog --
1444 that's what it's for.
1445
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001446Mac
1447---
1448
Just van Rossum99bc1fc2003-05-09 15:01:25 +00001449- There's a new module called "autoGIL", which offers a mechanism to
1450 automatically release the Global Interpreter Lock when an event loop
1451 goes to sleep, allowing other threads to run. It's currently only
1452 supported on OSX, in the Mach-O version.
Jack Jansenf5e23ff2003-06-16 13:53:40 +00001453- The OSA modules now allow direct access to properties of the
1454 toplevel application class (in AppleScript terminology).
1455- The Package Manager can now update itself.
Tim Peters49311302003-04-26 14:53:01 +00001456
Raymond Hettinger562a8552003-06-30 03:35:06 +00001457SourceForge Bugs and Patches Applied
1458------------------------------------
1459
1460430160, 471893, 501716, 542562, 549151, 569574, 595837, 596434,
1461598163, 604210, 604716, 610332, 612627, 614770, 620190, 621891,
1462622042, 639139, 640236, 644345, 649742, 649742, 658233, 660022,
1463661318, 661676, 662807, 662923, 666219, 672855, 678325, 682347,
1464683486, 684981, 685773, 686254, 692776, 692959, 693094, 696777,
1465697989, 700827, 703666, 708495, 708604, 708901, 710733, 711902,
1466713722, 715782, 718286, 719359, 719367, 723136, 723831, 723962,
1467724588, 724767, 724767, 725942, 726150, 726446, 726869, 727051,
1468727719, 727719, 727805, 728277, 728563, 728656, 729096, 729103,
1469729293, 729297, 729300, 729317, 729395, 729622, 729817, 730170,
1470730296, 730594, 730685, 730826, 730963, 731209, 731403, 731504,
1471731514, 731626, 731635, 731643, 731644, 731644, 731689, 732124,
1472732143, 732234, 732284, 732284, 732479, 732761, 732783, 732951,
1473733667, 733781, 734118, 734231, 734869, 735051, 735293, 735527,
1474735613, 735694, 736962, 736962, 737970, 738066, 739313, 740055,
1475740234, 740301, 741806, 742126, 742741, 742860, 742860, 742911,
1476744041, 744104, 744238, 744687, 744877, 745055, 745478, 745525,
1477745620, 746012, 746304, 746366, 746801, 746953, 747348, 747667,
1478747954, 748846, 748849, 748973, 748975, 749191, 749210, 749759,
1479749831, 749911, 750008, 750092, 750542, 750595, 751038, 751107,
1480751276, 751451, 751916, 751941, 751956, 751998, 752671, 753451,
1481753602, 753617, 753845, 753925, 754014, 754340, 754447, 755031,
1482755087, 755147, 755245, 755683, 755987, 756032, 756996, 757058,
1483757229, 757818, 757821, 757822, 758112, 758910, 759227, 759889,
1484760257, 760703, 760792, 761104, 761337, 761519, 761830, 762455
1485
1486
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001487What's New in Python 2.3 beta 1?
1488================================
1489
Guido van Rossumfa1eddf2003-04-25 19:19:52 +00001490*Release date: 25-Apr-2003*
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001491
1492Core and builtins
1493-----------------
1494
Thomas Heller5eccabc2003-04-23 19:35:25 +00001495- New format codes B, H, I, k and K have been implemented for
1496 PyArg_ParseTuple and PyBuild_Value.
1497
Alex Martellia70b1912003-04-22 08:12:33 +00001498- New builtin function sum(seq, start=0) returns the sum of all the
1499 items in iterable object seq, plus start (items are normally numbers,
1500 and cannot be strings).
1501
Guido van Rossumaa86e352003-04-19 18:15:10 +00001502- bool() called without arguments now returns False rather than
1503 raising an exception. This is consistent with calling the
1504 constructors for the other builtin types -- called without argument
1505 they all return the false value of that type. (SF patch #724135)
1506
Guido van Rossumcf8d2852003-04-17 16:53:26 +00001507- In support of PEP 269 (making the pgen parser generator accessible
1508 from Python), some changes to the pgen code structure were made; a
1509 few files that used to be linked only with pgen are now linked with
1510 Python itself.
1511
Guido van Rossumc1f6e8c2003-04-16 21:13:23 +00001512- The repr() of a weakref object now shows the __name__ attribute of
1513 the referenced object, if it has one.
1514
Guido van Rossum76ba09f2003-04-16 19:40:58 +00001515- super() no longer ignores data descriptors, except __class__. See
1516 the thread started at
1517 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-April/034338.html
1518
Guido van Rossum3a3cca52003-04-14 20:58:14 +00001519- list.insert(i, x) now interprets negative i as it would be
1520 interpreted by slicing, so negative values count from the end of the
1521 list. This was the only place where such an interpretation was not
1522 placed on a list index.
1523
Guido van Rossumefbbb1c2003-04-11 18:43:06 +00001524- range() now works even if the arguments are longs with magnitude
1525 larger than sys.maxint, as long as the total length of the sequence
1526 fits. E.g., range(2**100, 2**101, 2**100) is the following list:
1527 [1267650600228229401496703205376L]. (SF patch #707427.)
1528
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001529- Some horridly obscure problems were fixed involving interaction
1530 between garbage collection and old-style classes with "ambitious"
1531 getattr hooks. If an old-style instance didn't have a __del__ method,
1532 but did have a __getattr__ hook, and the instance became reachable
1533 only from an unreachable cycle, and the hook resurrected or deleted
1534 unreachable objects when asked to resolve "__del__", anything up to
1535 a segfault could happen. That's been repaired.
1536
Raymond Hettingera3e1e4c2003-03-06 23:54:28 +00001537- dict.pop now takes an optional argument specifying a default
1538 value to return if the key is not in the dict. If a default is not
1539 given and the key is not found, a KeyError will still be raised.
1540 Parallel changes were made to UserDict.UserDict and UserDict.DictMixin.
1541 [SF patch #693753] (contributed by Michael Stone.)
1542
Martin v. Löwis73d538b2003-03-05 15:13:47 +00001543- sys.getfilesystemencoding() was added to expose
1544 Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
Guido van Rossum46d3dc32003-03-01 03:20:41 +00001545
1546- New function sys.exc_clear() clears the current exception. This is
1547 rarely needed, but can sometimes be useful to release objects
1548 referenced by the traceback held in sys.exc_info()[2]. (SF patch
1549 #693195.)
1550
Neal Norwitzd5a65a72003-02-23 23:11:41 +00001551- On 64-bit systems, a dictionary could contain duplicate long/int keys
1552 if the key value was larger than 2**32. See SF bug #689659.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001553
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001554- Fixed SF bug #663074. The codec system was using global static
Walter Dörwaldfa86bf52003-03-31 16:15:13 +00001555 variables to store internal data. As a result, any attempts to use the
Gustavo Niemeyer5ddd4c32003-03-19 00:35:36 +00001556 unicode system with multiple active interpreters, or successive
1557 interpreter executions, would fail.
1558
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001559- "%c" % u"a" now returns a unicode string instead of raising a
Walter Dörwald44f527f2003-04-02 16:37:24 +00001560 TypeError. u"%c" % 0xffffffff now raises a OverflowError instead
Walter Dörwald1e469c52003-04-02 16:57:59 +00001561 of a ValueError to be consistent with "%c" % 256. See SF patch #710127.
Walter Dörwald43440a62003-03-31 18:07:50 +00001562
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001563Extension modules
1564-----------------
1565
Guido van Rossume7adda92003-04-25 05:52:37 +00001566- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
1567 for converting between string and packed representation of IP
1568 addresses. There is also a new module variable, has_ipv6, which is
1569 True iff the current Python has IPv6 support. See SF patch #658327.
1570
Martin v. Löwisbfe175c2003-04-16 19:42:51 +00001571- Tkinter wrappers around Tcl variables now pass objects directly
1572 to Tcl, instead of first converting them to strings.
1573
Guido van Rossum41c99e72003-04-14 17:59:34 +00001574- The .*? pattern in the re module is now special-cased to avoid the
1575 recursion limit. (SF patch #720991 -- many thanks to Gary Herron
1576 and Greg Chapman.)
1577
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001578- New function sys.call_tracing() allows pdb to debug code
1579 recursively.
1580
Tim Peters730f5532003-04-08 17:17:17 +00001581- New function gc.get_referents(obj) returns a list of objects
Tim Peters0f81ab62003-04-08 16:39:48 +00001582 directly referenced by obj. In effect, it exposes what the object's
1583 tp_traverse slot does, and can be helpful when debugging memory
1584 leaks.
1585
Martin v. Löwis7fb697b2003-04-03 04:49:12 +00001586- The iconv module has been removed from this release.
1587
Tim Petersd50ade62003-03-20 18:32:13 +00001588- The platform-independent routines for packing floats in IEEE formats
1589 (struct.pack's <f, >f, <d, and >d codes; pickle and cPickle's protocol 1
1590 pickling of floats) ignored that rounding can cause a carry to
1591 propagate. The worst consequence was that, in rare cases, <f and >f
1592 could produce strings that, when unpacked again, were a factor of 2
1593 away from the original float. This has been fixed. See SF bug
1594 #705836.
1595
Andrew M. Kuchling6c733d32003-07-16 20:11:34 +00001596- New function time.tzset() provides access to the C library tzset()
Guido van Rossumd11b62e2003-03-14 21:51:36 +00001597 function, if supported. (SF patch #675422.)
1598
Neal Norwitz12e22172003-03-03 21:16:39 +00001599- Using createfilehandler, deletefilehandler, createtimerhandler functions
1600 on Tkinter.tkinter (_tkinter module) no longer crashes the interpreter.
1601 See SF bug #692416.
1602
Michael W. Hudsonf0089982003-03-03 12:29:42 +00001603- Modified the fcntl.ioctl() function to allow modification of a passed
1604 mutable buffer (for details see the reference documentation).
1605
Raymond Hettinger61fe64d2003-02-23 04:40:07 +00001606- Made user requested changes to the itertools module.
1607 Subsumed the times() function into repeat().
1608 Added chain() and cycle().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001609
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001610- The rotor module is now deprecated; the encryption algorithm it uses
Andrew M. Kuchlingfb5f4852003-04-24 13:19:56 +00001611 is not believed to be secure, and including crypto code with Python
1612 has implications for exporting and importing it in various countries.
1613
Skip Montanaro89feabc2003-03-30 04:54:24 +00001614- The socket module now always uses the _socketobject wrapper class, even on
1615 platforms which have dup(2). The makefile() method is built directly
1616 on top of the socket without duplicating the file descriptor, allowing
1617 timeouts to work properly.
1618
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001619Library
1620-------
1621
Tim Petersc4e09402003-04-25 07:11:48 +00001622- New generator function os.walk() is an easy-to-use alternative to
1623 os.path.walk(). See os module docs for details. os.path.walk()
1624 isn't deprecated at this time, but may become deprecated in a
1625 future release.
1626
Marc-André Lemburg246d8472003-04-24 11:36:11 +00001627- Added new module "platform" which provides a wide range of tools
1628 for querying platform dependent features.
1629
Andrew M. Kuchling4e42b312003-04-24 16:45:05 +00001630- netrc now allows ASCII punctuation characters in passwords.
Raymond Hettinger1d877862003-04-23 19:06:08 +00001631
Martin v. Löwis153c9e42003-04-19 20:59:03 +00001632- shelve now supports the optional writeback argument, and exposes
1633 pickle protocol versions.
1634
Guido van Rossuma2685402003-04-19 18:04:57 +00001635- Several methods of nntplib.NNTP have grown an optional file argument
1636 which specifies a file where to divert the command's output
1637 (already supported by the body() method). (SF patch #720468)
1638
Martin v. Löwis281b2c62003-04-18 21:04:39 +00001639- The self-documenting XML server library DocXMLRPCServer was added.
1640
Martin v. Löwis2548c732003-04-18 10:39:54 +00001641- Support for internationalized domain names has been added through
1642 the 'idna' and 'punycode' encodings, the 'stringprep' module, the
1643 'mkstringprep' tool, and enhancements to the socket and httplib
1644 modules.
1645
Walter Dörwald5688b7a2003-04-16 09:46:13 +00001646- htmlentitydefs has two new dictionaries: name2codepoint maps
1647 HTML entity names to Unicode codepoints (as integers).
1648 codepoint2name is the reverse mapping. See SF patch #722017.
1649
Guido van Rossuma12fe4e2003-04-09 19:06:21 +00001650- pdb has a new command, "debug", which lets you step through
1651 arbitrary code from the debugger's (pdb) prompt.
1652
Raymond Hettingerc377cbf2003-04-04 22:56:42 +00001653- unittest.failUnlessEqual and its equivalent unittest.assertEqual now
1654 return 'not a == b' rather than 'a != b'. This gives the desired
1655 result for classes that define __eq__ without defining __ne__.
1656
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001657- sgmllib now supports SGML marked sections, in particular the
Martin v. Löwis3163a3b2003-03-30 14:25:40 +00001658 MS Office extensions.
1659
Raymond Hettinger42182eb2003-03-09 05:33:33 +00001660- The urllib module now offers support for the iterator protocol.
1661 SF patch 698520 contributed by Brett Cannon.
1662
Guido van Rossum9589a252003-03-06 01:56:12 +00001663- New module timeit provides a simple framework for timing the
1664 execution speed of expressions and statements.
1665
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001666- sets.Set objects now support mixed-type __eq__ and __ne__, instead
1667 of raising TypeError. If x is a Set object and y is a non-Set object,
1668 x == y is False, and x != y is True. This is akin to the change made
1669 for mixed-type comparisons of datetime objects in 2.3a2; more info
1670 about the rationale is in the NEWS entry for that. See also SF bug
1671 report <http://www.python.org/sf/693121>.
1672
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001673- On Unix platforms, if os.listdir() is called with a Unicode argument,
1674 it now returns Unicode strings. (This behavior was added earlier
1675 to the Windows NT/2k/XP version of os.listdir().)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001676
Andrew M. Kuchling6f177d42003-02-28 22:09:33 +00001677- Distutils: both 'py_modules' and 'packages' keywords can now be specified
1678 in core.setup(). Previously you could supply one or the other, but
1679 not both of them. (SF patch #695090 from Bernhard Herzog)
1680
Skip Montanaro64a839e2003-03-20 23:36:55 +00001681- New csv package makes it easy to read/write CSV files.
1682
Gustavo Niemeyer68d8cef2003-04-17 21:31:33 +00001683- Module shlex has been extended to allow posix-like shell parsings,
1684 including a split() function for easy spliting of quoted strings and
1685 commands. An iterator interface was also implemented.
1686
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001687Tools/Demos
1688-----------
1689
Tim Peters21d7d4d2003-04-18 00:45:59 +00001690- New script combinerefs.py helps analyze new PYTHONDUMPREFS output.
1691 See the module docstring for details.
1692
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001693Build
1694-----
1695
Neal Norwitz35892b92003-02-23 23:45:35 +00001696- Fix problem building on OSF1 because the compiler only accepted
1697 preprocessor directives that start in column 1. (SF bug #691793.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001698
1699C API
1700-----
1701
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001702- Added PyGC_Collect(), equivalent to calling gc.collect().
1703
Guido van Rossum0fc8f002003-04-15 15:12:39 +00001704- PyThreadState_GetDict() was changed not to raise an exception or
1705 issue a fatal error when no current thread state is available. This
1706 makes it possible to print dictionaries when no thread is active.
1707
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001708- LONG_LONG was renamed to PY_LONG_LONG. Extensions that use this and
1709 need compatibility with previous versions can use this:
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001710
Guido van Rossume13ddc92003-04-17 17:29:22 +00001711 #ifndef PY_LONG_LONG
1712 #define PY_LONG_LONG LONG_LONG
1713 #endif
Martin v. Löwisb9a0f912003-03-29 10:06:18 +00001714
Raymond Hettinger1da1dbf2003-03-17 19:46:11 +00001715- Added PyObject_SelfIter() to fill the tp_iter slot for the
Raymond Hettinger01538262003-03-17 08:24:35 +00001716 typical case where the method returns its self argument.
1717
Guido van Rossume5c691a2003-03-07 15:13:17 +00001718- The extended type structure used for heap types (new-style
1719 classes defined by Python code using a class statement) is now
1720 exported from object.h as PyHeapTypeObject. (SF patch #696193.)
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001721
1722New platforms
1723-------------
1724
Guido van Rossumecf0f022003-04-26 00:21:31 +00001725None this time.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001726
1727Tests
1728-----
1729
Neal Norwitz55b61d22003-02-28 19:57:03 +00001730- test_timeout now requires -u network to be passed to regrtest to run.
1731 See SF bug #692988.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001732
1733Windows
1734-------
1735
Tim Peters11b23062003-04-23 02:39:17 +00001736- os.fsync() now exists on Windows, and calls the Microsoft _commit()
1737 function.
1738
Guido van Rossumf4050642003-04-09 19:39:06 +00001739- New function winsound.MessageBeep() wraps the Win32 API
1740 MessageBeep().
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001741
1742Mac
1743---
1744
Just van Rossum96b1c902003-03-03 17:32:15 +00001745- os.listdir() now returns Unicode strings on MacOS X when called with
1746 a Unicode argument. See the general news item under "Library".
Just van Rossum46c97842003-02-25 21:42:15 +00001747
Jack Jansendeac2ac2003-02-24 11:04:17 +00001748- A new method MacOS.WMAvailable() returns true if it is safe to access
1749 the window manager, false otherwise.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00001750
Jack Jansencf76be02003-03-24 12:13:54 +00001751- EasyDialogs dialogs are now movable-modal, and if the application is
1752 currently in the background they will ask to be moved to the foreground
1753 before displaying.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001754
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001755- OSA Scripting support has improved a lot, and gensuitemodule.py can now
Jack Jansende354b72003-04-11 15:37:20 +00001756 be used by mere mortals. The documentation is now also more or less
1757 complete.
Tim Petersf6b80452003-04-07 19:21:15 +00001758
Jack Jansena02b7a82003-04-01 22:33:37 +00001759- The IDE (in a framework build) now includes introductory documentation
1760 in Apple Help Viewer format.
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00001761
1762
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001763What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 2?
1764=================================
1765
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00001766*Release date: 19-Feb-2003*
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001767
1768Core and builtins
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001769-----------------
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001770
Walter Dörwald2ffec022003-02-19 16:34:11 +00001771- Negative positions returned from PEP 293 error callbacks are now
1772 treated as being relative to the end of the input string. Positions
1773 that are out of bounds raise an IndexError.
1774
Guido van Rossum162e38c2003-02-19 15:25:10 +00001775- sys.path[0] (the directory from which the script is loaded) is now
1776 turned into an absolute pathname, unless it is the empty string.
1777 (SF patch #664376.)
1778
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001779- Finally fixed the bug in compile() and exec where a string ending
1780 with an indented code block but no newline would raise SyntaxError.
1781 This would have been a four-line change in parsetok.c... Except
1782 codeop.py depends on this behavior, so a compilation flag had to be
1783 invented that causes the tokenizer to revert to the old behavior;
1784 this required extra changes to 2 .h files, 2 .c files, and 2 .py
Guido van Rossum1442dc12003-02-13 22:19:20 +00001785 files. (Fixes SF bug #501622.)
Guido van Rossum4b499dd32003-02-13 22:07:59 +00001786
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001787- If a new-style class defines neither __new__ nor __init__, its
1788 constructor would ignore all arguments. This is changed now: the
1789 constructor refuses arguments in this case. This might break code
1790 that worked under Python 2.2. The simplest fix is to add a no-op
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001791 __init__: ``def __init__(self, *args, **kw): pass``.
Guido van Rossum298e4212003-02-13 16:30:16 +00001792
Guido van Rossum48035eb2003-02-12 17:05:26 +00001793- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
1794 Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
1795 with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
1796 ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
1797 range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
1798 always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
1799 E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
1800 come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
1801 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
1802 value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
1803 will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
1804
Guido van Rossum47710652003-02-12 20:48:22 +00001805- int(s, base) sometimes sign-folds hex and oct constants; it only
1806 does this when base is 0 and s.strip() starts with a '0'. When the
1807 sign is actually folded, as in int("0xffffffff", 0) on a 32-bit
1808 machine, which returns -1, a FutureWarning is now issued; in Python
1809 2.4, this will return 4294967295L, as do int("+0xffffffff", 0) and
1810 int("0xffffffff", 16) right now. (PEP 347)
1811
Guido van Rossuma89d10e2003-02-12 03:58:38 +00001812- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
1813 issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).
1814
Guido van Rossum03bc7d32003-02-12 03:32:58 +00001815- isinstance(x, X): if X is a new-style class, this is now equivalent
1816 to issubclass(type(x), X) or issubclass(x.__class__, X). Previously
1817 only type(x) was tested. (For classic classes this was already the
1818 case.)
1819
Just van Rossum73ffb4a2003-02-10 09:57:08 +00001820- compile(), eval() and the exec statement now fully support source code
1821 passed as unicode strings.
1822
Neal Norwitzde8b94c2003-02-10 02:12:43 +00001823- int subclasses can be initialized with longs if the value fits in an int.
1824 See SF bug #683467.
1825
Tim Petersbf2674b2003-02-02 07:51:32 +00001826- long(string, base) takes time linear in len(string) when base is a power
1827 of 2 now. It used to take time quadratic in len(string).
1828
Martin v. Löwis8afd7572003-01-25 22:46:11 +00001829- filter returns now Unicode results for Unicode arguments.
1830
Martin v. Löwisaf6a27a2003-01-03 19:16:14 +00001831- raw_input can now return Unicode objects.
1832
Skip Montanaro4abd5f02003-01-02 20:51:08 +00001833- List objects' sort() method now accepts None as the comparison function.
1834 Passing None is semantically identical to calling sort() with no
1835 arguments.
1836
Neal Norwitz1a997502003-01-13 20:13:12 +00001837- Fixed crash when printing a subclass of str and __str__ returned self.
1838 See SF bug #667147.
1839
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001840- Fixed an invalid RuntimeWarning and an undetected error when trying
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001841 to convert a long integer into a float which couldn't fit.
Neal Norwitzabcb0c02003-01-28 19:21:24 +00001842 See SF bug #676155.
1843
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001844- Function objects now have a __module__ attribute that is bound to
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001845 the name of the module in which the function was defined. This
Guido van Rossum26507db2003-02-06 16:16:50 +00001846 applies for C functions and methods as well as functions and methods
1847 defined in Python. This attribute is used by pickle.whichmodule(),
1848 which changes the behavior of whichmodule slightly. In Python 2.2
1849 whichmodule() returns "__main__" for functions that are not defined
1850 at the top-level of a module (examples: methods, nested functions).
1851 Now whichmodule() will return the proper module name.
Jeremy Hylton0253d6e2003-02-06 16:00:15 +00001852
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001853Extension modules
1854-----------------
1855
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00001856- operator.isNumberType() now checks that the object has a nb_int or
1857 nb_float slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
1858 tp_as_number pointer.
1859
Guido van Rossumc4f4ca92003-02-12 21:46:11 +00001860- The imp module now has ways to acquire and release the "import
1861 lock": imp.acquire_lock() and imp.release_lock(). Note: this is a
1862 reentrant lock, so releasing the lock only truly releases it when
1863 this is the last release_lock() call. You can check with
1864 imp.lock_held(). (SF bug #580952 and patch #683257.)
1865
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001866- Change to cPickle to match pickle.py (see below and PEP 307).
1867
Neal Norwitz9caf9c02003-02-10 01:54:06 +00001868- Fix some bugs in the parser module. SF bug #678518.
1869
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001870- Thanks to Scott David Daniels, a subtle bug in how the zlib
Walter Dörwald28d81962003-02-03 20:53:14 +00001871 extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrote the
Guido van Rossum7d9ea502003-02-03 20:45:52 +00001872 zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
1873 patch #678531.)
1874
Raymond Hettinger96ef8112003-02-01 00:10:11 +00001875- Added an itertools module containing high speed, memory efficient
1876 looping constructs inspired by tools from Haskell and SML.
1877
Guido van Rossum99d4abf2003-01-27 22:22:50 +00001878- The SSL module now handles sockets with a timeout set correctly (SF
1879 patch #675750, fixing SF bug #675552).
1880
Barry Warsawf8ba39c2003-01-07 20:55:26 +00001881- os/posixmodule has grown the sysexits.h constants (EX_OK and friends).
1882
Guido van Rossum6d0d3652003-01-07 20:34:19 +00001883- Fixed broken threadstate swap in readline that could cause fatal
1884 errors when a readline hook was being invoked while a background
1885 thread was active. (SF bugs #660476 and #513033.)
1886
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001887- fcntl now exposes the strops.h I_* constants.
1888
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00001889- Fix a crash on Solaris that occurred when calling close() on
1890 an mmap'ed file which was already closed. (SF patch #665913)
1891
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00001892- Fixed several serious bugs in the zipimport implementation.
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00001893
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001894- datetime changes:
1895
Guido van Rossum8b7a9a32003-04-14 22:01:58 +00001896 The date class is now properly subclassable. (SF bug #720908)
1897
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00001898 The datetime and datetimetz classes have been collapsed into a single
1899 datetime class, and likewise the time and timetz classes into a single
1900 time class. Previously, a datetimetz object with tzinfo=None acted
1901 exactly like a datetime object, and similarly for timetz. This wasn't
1902 enough of a difference to justify distinct classes, and life is simpler
1903 now.
1904
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001905 today() and now() now round system timestamps to the closest
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001906 microsecond <http://www.python.org/sf/661086>. This repairs an
1907 irritation most likely seen on Windows systems.
Tim Peters01231392003-01-02 19:10:19 +00001908
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001909 In dt.astimezone(tz), if tz.utcoffset(dt) returns a duration,
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001910 ValueError is raised if tz.dst(dt) returns None (2.3a1 treated it
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001911 as 0 instead, but a tzinfo subclass wishing to participate in
1912 time zone conversion has to take a stand on whether it supports
1913 DST; if you don't care about DST, then code dst() to return 0 minutes,
1914 meaning that DST is never in effect).
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001915
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001916 The tzinfo methods utcoffset() and dst() must return a timedelta object
1917 (or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
1918 was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
Tim Peters397301e2003-01-02 21:28:08 +00001919 they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
1920
Tim Peters77023042003-01-03 22:35:24 +00001921 The example tzinfo class for local time had a bug. It was replaced
1922 by a later example coded by Guido.
1923
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001924 datetime.astimezone(tz) no longer raises an exception when the
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001925 input datetime has no UTC equivalent in tz. For typical "hybrid" time
1926 zones (a single tzinfo subclass modeling both standard and daylight
1927 time), this case can arise one hour per year, at the hour daylight time
Tim Petersf196a0a2003-01-22 04:45:50 +00001928 ends. See new docs for details. In short, the new behavior mimics
1929 the local wall clock's behavior of repeating an hour in local time.
1930
1931 dt.astimezone() can no longer be used to convert between naive and aware
1932 datetime objects. If you merely want to attach, or remove, a tzinfo
1933 object, without any conversion of date and time members, use
1934 dt.replace(tzinfo=whatever) instead, where "whatever" is None or a
1935 tzinfo subclass instance.
1936
1937 A new method tzinfo.fromutc(dt) can be overridden in tzinfo subclasses
1938 to give complete control over how a UTC time is to be converted to
1939 a local time. The default astimezone() implementation calls fromutc()
1940 as its last step, so a tzinfo subclass can affect that too by overriding
1941 fromutc(). It's expected that the default fromutc() implementation will
1942 be suitable as-is for "almost all" time zone subclasses, but the
1943 creativity of political time zone fiddling appears unbounded -- fromutc()
1944 allows the highly motivated to emulate any scheme expressible in Python.
Tim Petersadf64202003-01-04 06:03:15 +00001945
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001946 datetime.now(): The optional tzinfo argument was undocumented (that's
1947 repaired), and its name was changed to tz ("tzinfo" is overloaded enough
1948 already). With a tz argument, now(tz) used to return the local date
1949 and time, and attach tz to it, without any conversion of date and time
1950 members. This was less than useful. Now now(tz) returns the current
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001951 date and time as local time in tz's time zone, akin to ::
1952
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001953 tz.fromutc(datetime.utcnow().replace(tzinfo=utc))
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001954
Tim Peters10cadce2003-01-23 19:58:02 +00001955 where "utc" is an instance of a tzinfo subclass modeling UTC. Without
1956 a tz argument, now() continues to return the current local date and time,
1957 as a naive datetime object.
1958
Tim Peters2a44a8d2003-01-23 20:53:10 +00001959 datetime.fromtimestamp(): Like datetime.now() above, this had less than
1960 useful behavior when the optional tinzo argument was specified. See
1961 also SF bug report <http://www.python.org/sf/660872>.
1962
Tim Peters8d81a012003-01-24 22:36:34 +00001963 date and datetime comparison: In order to prevent comparison from
1964 falling back to the default compare-object-addresses strategy, these
1965 raised TypeError whenever they didn't understand the other object type.
1966 They still do, except when the other object has a "timetuple" attribute,
1967 in which case they return NotImplemented now. This gives other
1968 datetime objects (e.g., mxDateTime) a chance to intercept the
1969 comparison.
1970
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001971 date, time, datetime and timedelta comparison: When the exception
1972 for mixed-type comparisons in the last paragraph doesn't apply, if
1973 the comparison is == then False is returned, and if the comparison is
1974 != then True is returned. Because dict lookup and the "in" operator
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001975 only invoke __eq__, this allows, for example, ::
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001976
1977 if some_datetime in some_sequence:
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00001978
1979 and ::
1980
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00001981 some_dict[some_timedelta] = whatever
1982
1983 to work as expected, without raising TypeError just because the
1984 sequence is heterogeneous, or the dict has mixed-type keys. [This
1985 seems like a good idea to implement for all mixed-type comparisons
1986 that don't want to allow falling back to address comparison.]
1987
Tim Peters75a6e3b2003-01-04 18:17:36 +00001988 The constructors building a datetime from a timestamp could raise
1989 ValueError if the platform C localtime()/gmtime() inserted "leap
1990 seconds". Leap seconds are ignored now. On such platforms, it's
1991 possible to have timestamps that differ by a second, yet where
1992 datetimes constructed from them are equal.
1993
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001994 The pickle format of date, time and datetime objects has changed
1995 completely. The undocumented pickler and unpickler functions no
Tim Petersb57f8f02003-02-01 02:54:15 +00001996 longer exist. The undocumented __setstate__() and __getstate__()
1997 methods no longer exist either.
Tim Peters506be282003-01-31 22:27:17 +00001998
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00001999Library
2000-------
2001
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002002- The logging module was updated slightly; the WARN level was renamed
2003 to WARNING, and the matching function/method warn() to warning().
2004
2005- The pickle and cPickle modules were updated with a new pickling
2006 protocol (documented by pickletools.py, see below) and several
2007 extensions to the pickle customization API (__reduce__, __setstate__
2008 etc.). The copy module now uses more of the pickle customization
2009 API to copy objects that don't implement __copy__ or __deepcopy__.
2010 See PEP 307 for details.
2011
2012- The distutils "register" command now uses http://www.python.org/pypi
2013 as the default repository. (See PEP 301.)
2014
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002015- the platform dependent path related variables sep, altsep, extsep,
2016 pathsep, curdir, pardir and defpath are now defined in the platform
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002017 dependent path modules (e.g. ntpath.py) rather than os.py, so these
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002018 variables are now available via os.path. They continue to be
2019 available from the os module.
Michael W. Hudson9e5d87f2003-02-17 12:26:23 +00002020 (see <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
Andrew MacIntyre251b8162003-02-17 09:20:23 +00002021
Tim Peters6ee04802003-02-05 18:29:34 +00002022- array.array was added to the types repr.py knows about (see
2023 <http://www.python.org/sf/680789>).
2024
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002025- The new pickletools.py contains lots of documentation about pickle
2026 internals, and supplies some helpers for working with pickles, such as
2027 a symbolic pickle disassembler.
2028
Skip Montanaro9a7c96a2003-01-22 18:17:25 +00002029- Xmlrpclib.py now supports the builtin boolean type.
2030
Martin v. Löwis0c6774d2003-01-15 11:51:06 +00002031- py_compile has a new 'doraise' flag and a new PyCompileError
2032 exception.
2033
Martin v. Löwisd69663d2003-01-15 11:37:23 +00002034- SimpleXMLRPCServer now supports CGI through the CGIXMLRPCRequestHandler
2035 class.
2036
Guido van Rossum50e92232003-01-14 16:45:04 +00002037- The sets module now raises TypeError in __cmp__, to clarify that
2038 sets are not intended to be three-way-compared; the comparison
2039 operators are overloaded as subset/superset tests.
2040
Guido van Rossumcd0c0472003-01-07 23:03:05 +00002041- Bastion.py and rexec.py are disabled. These modules are not safe in
2042 Python 2.2. or 2.3.
2043
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002044- realpath is now exported when doing ``from poxixpath import *``.
Neal Norwitzbb0246a2003-01-03 18:12:28 +00002045 It is also exported for ntpath, macpath, and os2emxpath.
2046 See SF bug #659228.
2047
Neal Norwitzb9ef4ae2003-01-05 23:19:43 +00002048- New module tarfile from Lars Gustäbel provides a comprehensive interface
2049 to tar archive files with transparent gzip and bzip2 compression.
2050 See SF patch #651082.
2051
Neal Norwitz4f442372003-01-06 06:51:36 +00002052- urlparse can now parse imap:// URLs. See SF feature request #618024.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002053
Neal Norwitze931ed52003-01-10 23:24:32 +00002054- Tkinter.Canvas.scan_dragto() provides an optional parameter to support
2055 the gain value which is passed to Tk. SF bug# 602259.
2056
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002057- Fix logging.handlers.SysLogHandler protocol when using UNIX domain sockets.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002058 See SF patch #642974.
Neal Norwitze4c40da2003-01-26 02:45:47 +00002059
Skip Montanaro12fe72e2003-02-25 17:46:20 +00002060- The dospath module was deleted. Use the ntpath module when manipulating
2061 DOS paths from other platforms.
2062
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002063Tools/Demos
2064-----------
2065
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002066- Two new scripts (db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py) were added to the
2067 Tools/scripts directory to facilitate conversion from the old bsddb module
2068 to the new one. While the user-visible API of the new module is
2069 compatible with the old one, it's likely that the version of the
2070 underlying database library has changed. To convert from the old library,
2071 run the db2pickle.py script using the old version of Python to convert it
2072 to a pickle file. After upgrading Python, run the pickle2db.py script
2073 using the new version of Python to reconstitute your database. For
2074 example:
2075
Skip Montanaro621f0552003-02-03 15:48:10 +00002076 % python2.2 db2pickle.py -h some.db > some.pickle
2077 % python2.3 pickle2db.py -h some.db.new < some.pickle
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002078
2079 Run the scripts without any args to get a usage message.
2080
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002081
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002082Build
2083-----
2084
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002085- The audio driver tests (test_ossaudiodev.py and
2086 test_linuxaudiodev.py) are no longer run by default. This is
2087 because they don't always work, depending on your hardware and
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002088 software. To run these tests, you must use an invocation like ::
2089
Guido van Rossum4507ec72003-02-14 19:29:22 +00002090 ./python Lib/test/regrtest.py -u audio test_ossaudiodev
2091
Skip Montanarodecc6a42003-01-01 20:07:49 +00002092- On systems which build using the configure script, compiler flags which
2093 used to be lumped together using the OPT flag have been split into two
2094 groups, OPT and BASECFLAGS. OPT is meant to carry just optimization- and
2095 debug-related flags like "-g" and "-O3". BASECFLAGS is meant to carry
2096 compiler flags that are required to get a clean compile. On some
2097 platforms (many Linux flavors in particular) BASECFLAGS will be empty by
2098 default. On others, such as Mac OS X and SCO, it will contain required
2099 flags. This change allows people building Python to override OPT without
2100 fear of clobbering compiler flags which are required to get a clean build.
2101
2102- On Darwin/Mac OS X platforms, /sw/lib and /sw/include are added to the
2103 relevant search lists in setup.py. This allows users building Python to
2104 take advantage of the many packages available from the fink project
2105 <http://fink.sf.net/>.
2106
2107- A new Makefile target, scriptsinstall, installs a number of useful scripts
2108 from the Tools/scripts directory.
2109
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002110C API
2111-----
2112
David Goodgerdd83cce2003-02-19 23:31:51 +00002113- PyEval_GetFrame() is now declared to return a ``PyFrameObject *``
2114 instead of a plain ``PyObject *``. (SF patch #686601.)
Guido van Rossum6297a7a2003-02-19 15:53:17 +00002115
Guido van Rossum6921eca2003-02-18 16:36:28 +00002116- PyNumber_Check() now checks that the object has a nb_int or nb_float
2117 slot, rather than simply checking whether it has a non-NULL
2118 tp_as_number pointer.
2119
Guido van Rossumeea47182003-02-11 20:39:59 +00002120- A C type that inherits from a base type that defines tp_as_buffer
2121 will now inherit the tp_as_buffer pointer if it doesn't define one.
2122 (SF #681367)
2123
Neil Schemenauer5042da62003-02-04 20:59:40 +00002124- The PyArg_Parse functions now issue a DeprecationWarning if a float
2125 argument is provided when an integer is specified (this affects the 'b',
2126 'B', 'h', 'H', 'i', and 'l' codes). Future versions of Python will
2127 raise a TypeError.
Neil Schemenauercd63e612003-01-24 22:15:53 +00002128
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002129Tests
2130-----
2131
Walter Dörwald11cfbd62003-03-26 16:03:16 +00002132- Several tests weren't being run from regrtest.py (test_timeout.py,
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002133 test_tarfile.py, test_netrc.py, test_multifile.py,
2134 test_importhooks.py and test_imp.py). Now they are. (Note to
2135 developers: please read Lib/test/README when creating a new test, to
2136 make sure to do it right! All tests need to use either unittest or
2137 pydoc.)
2138
2139- Added test_posix.py, a test suite for the posix module.
2140
2141- Added test_hexoct.py, a test suite for hex/oct constant folding.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002142
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002143Windows
2144-------
2145
Guido van Rossum22e2f732003-02-19 18:18:47 +00002146- The timeout code for socket connect() didn't work right; this has
2147 now been fixed. test_timeout.py should pass (at least most of the
2148 time).
2149
Thomas Hellerdda583d2003-01-31 20:45:41 +00002150- distutils' msvccompiler class now passes the preprocessor options to
2151 the resource compiler. See SF patch #669198.
2152
Tim Peters00640262003-01-24 15:31:31 +00002153- The bsddb module now ships with Sleepycat's 4.1.25.NC, the latest
2154 release without strong cryptography.
2155
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002156- sys.path[0], if it contains a directory name, is now always an
Guido van Rossuma0032902003-02-20 01:38:31 +00002157 absolute pathname. (SF patch #664376.)
Thomas Heller6c64fa72003-01-08 15:14:55 +00002158
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002159- The new logging package is now installed by the Windows installer. It
2160 wasn't in 2.3a1 due to oversight.
2161
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002162Mac
2163---
2164
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002165- There are new dialogs EasyDialogs.AskFileForOpen, AskFileForSave
2166 and AskFolder. The old macfs.StandardGetFile and friends are deprecated.
Tim Peters07534a62003-02-07 22:50:28 +00002167
Jack Jansenc9296362003-02-06 23:10:45 +00002168- Most of the standard library now uses pathnames or FSRefs in preference
2169 of FSSpecs, and use the underlying Carbon.File and Carbon.Folder modules
2170 in stead of macfs. macfs will probably be deprecated in the future.
Tim Peters8ecfc8e2003-01-27 18:51:48 +00002171
Jack Jansen1a1b6e42003-01-27 15:21:39 +00002172- Type Carbon.File.FSCatalogInfo and supporting methods have been implemented.
2173 This also makes macfs.FSSpec.SetDates() work again.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002174
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002175- There is a new module pimp, the package install manager for Python, and
2176 accompanying applet PackageManager. These allow you to easily download
2177 and install pretested extension packages either in source or binary
2178 form. Only in MacPython-OSX.
Tim Peters44f14b02003-03-02 00:19:49 +00002179
Jack Jansen9f70aab2003-02-16 23:00:53 +00002180- Applets are now built with bundlebuilder in MacPython-OSX, which should make
Jack Jansen5d44b342003-02-18 23:32:47 +00002181 them more robust and also provides a path towards BuildApplication. The
2182 downside of this change is that applets can no longer be run from the
2183 Terminal window, this will hopefully be fixed in the 2.3b1.
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002184
Martin v. Löwis14e73b12003-01-01 09:51:12 +00002185
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002186What's New in Python 2.3 alpha 1?
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002187=================================
2188
Guido van Rossumae548862002-12-31 15:47:36 +00002189*Release date: 31-Dec-2002*
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002190
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002191Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002192--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002193
Michael W. Hudson96bc3b42002-11-26 14:48:23 +00002194- One can now assign to __bases__ and __name__ of new-style classes.
2195
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002196- dict() now accepts keyword arguments so that dict(one=1, two=2)
2197 is the equivalent of {"one": 1, "two": 2}. Accordingly,
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002198 the existing (but undocumented) 'items' keyword argument has
Guido van Rossum8b1e74b2002-11-23 16:28:12 +00002199 been eliminated. This means that dict(items=someMapping) now has
Just van Rossuma797d812002-11-23 09:45:04 +00002200 a different meaning than before.
2201
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002202- int() now returns a long object if the argument is outside the
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002203 integer range, so int("4" * 1000), int(1e200) and int(1L<<1000) will
Walter Dörwaldf1715402002-11-19 20:49:15 +00002204 all return long objects instead of raising an OverflowError.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002205
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002206- Assignment to __class__ is disallowed if either the old or the new
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002207 class is a statically allocated type object (such as defined by an
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002208 extension module). This prevents anomalies like 2.__class__ = bool.
Guido van Rossume3438782002-08-12 03:42:03 +00002209
2210- New-style object creation and deallocation have been sped up
2211 significantly; they are now faster than classic instance creation
2212 and deallocation.
2213
2214- The __slots__ variable can now mention "private" names, and the
2215 right thing will happen (e.g. __slots__ = ["__foo"]).
2216
2217- The built-ins slice() and buffer() are now callable types. The
2218 types classobj (formerly class), code, function, instance, and
2219 instancemethod (formerly instance-method), which have no built-in
2220 names but are accessible through the types module, are now also
2221 callable. The type dict-proxy is renamed to dictproxy.
2222
2223- Cycles going through the __class__ link of a new-style instance are
2224 now detected by the garbage collector.
2225
2226- Classes using __slots__ are now properly garbage collected.
2227 [SF bug 519621]
2228
2229- Tightened the __slots__ rules: a slot name must be a valid Python
2230 identifier.
2231
2232- The constructor for the module type now requires a name argument and
2233 takes an optional docstring argument. Previously, this constructor
2234 ignored its arguments. As a consequence, deriving a class from a
2235 module (not from the module type) is now illegal; previously this
2236 created an unnamed module, just like invoking the module type did.
2237 [SF bug 563060]
2238
2239- A new type object, 'basestring', is added. This is a common base type
2240 for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
2241 types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
2242 isinstance(x, basestring) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
2243 is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
2244
2245- Changed new-style class instantiation so that when C's __new__
2246 method returns something that's not a C instance, its __init__ is
2247 not called. [SF bug #537450]
2248
2249- Fixed super() to work correctly with class methods. [SF bug #535444]
2250
2251- If you try to pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but
2252 doesn't define or override __getstate__, a TypeError is now raised.
2253 This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__ to the class that always
2254 raises TypeError. (Before, this would appear to be pickled, but the
2255 state of the slots would be lost.)
2256
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002257Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002258-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002259
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002260- Import from zipfiles is now supported. The name of a zipfile placed
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002261 on sys.path causes the import statement to look for importable Python
2262 modules (with .py, pyc and .pyo extensions) and packages inside the
2263 zipfile. The zipfile import follows the specification (though not
2264 the sample implementation) of PEP 273. The semantics of __path__ are
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002265 compatible with those that have been implemented in Jython since
2266 Jython 2.1.
2267
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002268- PEP 302 has been accepted. Although it was initially developed to
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00002269 support zipimport, it offers a new, general import hook mechanism.
Just van Rossum01875eb2002-12-31 10:22:38 +00002270 Several new variables have been added to the sys module:
2271 sys.meta_path, sys.path_hooks, and sys.path_importer_cache; these
2272 make extending the import statement much more convenient than
2273 overriding the __import__ built-in function. For a description of
2274 these, see PEP 302.
2275
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002276- A frame object's f_lineno attribute can now be written to from a
2277 trace function to change which line will execute next. A command to
2278 exploit this from pdb has been added. [SF patch #643835]
2279
Marc-André Lemburg20b91352002-12-12 18:01:43 +00002280- The _codecs support module for codecs.py was turned into a builtin
2281 module to assure that at least the builtin codecs are available
2282 to the Python parser for source code decoding according to PEP 263.
2283
Walter Dörwaldd9a6ad32002-12-12 16:41:44 +00002284- issubclass now supports a tuple as the second argument, just like
2285 isinstance does. ``issubclass(X, (A, B))`` is equivalent to
2286 ``issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B)``.
2287
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002288- Thanks to Armin Rigo, the last known way to provoke a system crash
2289 by cleverly arranging for a comparison function to mutate a list
2290 during a list.sort() operation has been fixed. The effect of
2291 attempting to mutate a list, or even to inspect its contents or
2292 length, while a sort is in progress, is not defined by the language.
2293 The C implementation of Python 2.3 attempts to detect mutations,
2294 and raise ValueError if one occurs, but there's no guarantee that
2295 all mutations will be caught, or that any will be caught across
2296 releases or implementations.
2297
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002298- Unicode file name processing for Windows (PEP 277) is implemented.
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002299 All platforms now have an os.path.supports_unicode_filenames attribute,
2300 which is set to True on Windows NT/2000/XP, and False elsewhere.
Martin v. Löwisa844f2d2002-10-05 09:46:48 +00002301
Walter Dörwald3aeb6322002-09-02 13:14:32 +00002302- Codec error handling callbacks (PEP 293) are implemented.
2303 Error handling in unicode.encode or str.decode can now be customized.
2304
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00002305- A subtle change to the semantics of the built-in function intern():
2306 interned strings are no longer immortal. You must keep a reference
2307 to the return value intern() around to get the benefit.
2308
Guido van Rossumf808b892002-08-16 03:38:10 +00002309- Use of 'None' as a variable, argument or attribute name now
2310 issues a SyntaxWarning. In the future, None may become a keyword.
2311
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002312- SET_LINENO is gone. co_lnotab is now consulted to determine when to
2313 call the trace function. C code that accessed f_lineno should call
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002314 PyCode_Addr2Line instead (f_lineno is still there, but only kept up
2315 to date when there is a trace function set).
Michael W. Hudsondd32a912002-08-15 14:59:02 +00002316
Guido van Rossum9be89462002-08-14 16:11:30 +00002317- There's a new warning category, FutureWarning. This is used to warn
2318 about a number of situations where the value or sign of an integer
2319 result will change in Python 2.4 as a result of PEP 237 (integer
2320 unification). The warnings implement stage B0 mentioned in that
2321 PEP. The warnings are about the following situations:
2322
2323 - Octal and hex literals without 'L' prefix in the inclusive range
2324 [0x80000000..0xffffffff]; these are currently negative ints, but
2325 in Python 2.4 they will be positive longs with the same bit
2326 pattern.
2327
2328 - Left shifts on integer values that cause the outcome to lose
2329 bits or have a different sign than the left operand. To be
2330 precise: x<<n where this currently doesn't yield the same value
2331 as long(x)<<n; in Python 2.4, the outcome will be long(x)<<n.
2332
2333 - Conversions from ints to string that show negative values as
2334 unsigned ints in the inclusive range [0x80000000..0xffffffff];
2335 this affects the functions hex() and oct(), and the string
2336 formatting codes %u, %o, %x, and %X. In Python 2.4, these will
2337 show signed values (e.g. hex(-1) currently returns "0xffffffff";
2338 in Python 2.4 it will return "-0x1").
2339
Guido van Rossum9a2eda52002-12-31 02:12:42 +00002340- The bits manipulated under the cover by sys.setcheckinterval() have
2341 been changed. Both the check interval and the ticker used to be
2342 per-thread values. They are now just a pair of global variables.
2343 In addition, the default check interval was boosted from 10 to 100
2344 bytecode instructions. This may have some effect on systems that
2345 relied on the old default value. In particular, in multi-threaded
2346 applications which try to be highly responsive, response time will
2347 increase by some (perhaps imperceptible) amount.
Skip Montanaro979c74b2002-09-03 21:25:14 +00002348
Tim Petersd64c1de2002-08-12 17:36:03 +00002349- When multiplying very large integers, a version of the so-called
2350 Karatsuba algorithm is now used. This is most effective if the
2351 inputs have roughly the same size. If they both have about N digits,
2352 Karatsuba multiplication has O(N**1.58) runtime (the exponent is
2353 log_base_2(3)) instead of the previous O(N**2). Measured results may
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002354 be better or worse than that, depending on platform quirks. Besides
2355 the O() improvement in raw instruction count, the Karatsuba algorithm
2356 appears to have much better cache behavior on extremely large integers
2357 (starting in the ballpark of a million bits). Note that this is a
2358 simple implementation, and there's no intent here to compete with,
2359 e.g., GMP. It gives a very nice speedup when it applies, but a package
2360 devoted to fast large-integer arithmetic should run circles around it.
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002361
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00002362- u'%c' will now raise a ValueError in case the argument is an
2363 integer outside the valid range of Unicode code point ordinals.
2364
Guido van Rossumdeb09362002-08-09 17:16:30 +00002365- The tempfile module has been overhauled for enhanced security. The
2366 mktemp() function is now deprecated; new, safe replacements are
2367 mkstemp() (for files) and mkdtemp() (for directories), and the
2368 higher-level functions NamedTemporaryFile() and TemporaryFile().
2369 Use of some global variables in this module is also deprecated; the
2370 new functions have keyword arguments to provide the same
2371 functionality. All Lib, Tools and Demo modules that used the unsafe
2372 interfaces have been updated to use the safe replacements. Thanks
2373 to Zack Weinberg!
2374
Guido van Rossumd81a9832002-08-09 15:57:34 +00002375- When x is an object whose class implements __mul__ and __rmul__,
2376 1.0*x would correctly invoke __rmul__, but 1*x would erroneously
2377 invoke __mul__. This was due to the sequence-repeat code in the int
2378 type. This has been fixed now.
2379
Barry Warsawd79f6832002-08-06 17:01:51 +00002380- Previously, "str1 in str2" required str1 to be a string of length 1.
2381 This restriction has been relaxed to allow str1 to be a string of
2382 any length. Thus "'el' in 'hello world'" returns True now.
2383
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002384- File objects are now their own iterators. For a file f, iter(f) now
2385 returns f (unless f is closed), and f.next() is similar to
2386 f.readline() when EOF is not reached; however, f.next() uses a
2387 readahead buffer that messes up the file position, so mixing
2388 f.next() and f.readline() (or other methods) doesn't work right.
2389 Calling f.seek() drops the readahead buffer, but other operations
2390 don't. It so happens that this gives a nice additional speed boost
2391 to "for line in file:"; the xreadlines method and corresponding
Guido van Rossumbffb2ef2002-08-09 17:17:07 +00002392 module are now obsolete. Thanks to Oren Tirosh!
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002393
Guido van Rossumde392d32002-08-05 14:17:20 +00002394- Encoding declarations (PEP 263, phase 1) have been implemented. A
2395 comment of the form "# -*- coding: <encodingname> -*-" in the first
2396 or second line of a Python source file indicates the encoding.
Martin v. Löwis00f1e3f2002-08-04 17:29:52 +00002397
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002398- list.sort() has a new implementation. While cross-platform results
2399 may vary, and in data-dependent ways, this is much faster on many
2400 kinds of partially ordered lists than the previous implementation,
2401 and reported to be just as fast on randomly ordered lists on
2402 several major platforms. This sort is also stable (if A==B and A
2403 precedes B in the list at the start, A precedes B after the sort too),
2404 although the language definition does not guarantee stability. A
2405 potential drawback is that list.sort() may require temp space of
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00002406 len(list)*2 bytes (``*4`` on a 64-bit machine). It's therefore possible
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002407 for list.sort() to raise MemoryError now, even if a comparison function
2408 does not. See <http://www.python.org/sf/587076> for full details.
2409
Guido van Rossum2d5389c2002-07-23 03:44:35 +00002410- All standard iterators now ensure that, once StopIteration has been
2411 raised, all future calls to next() on the same iterator will also
2412 raise StopIteration. There used to be various counterexamples to
2413 this behavior, which could caused confusion or subtle program
2414 breakage, without any benefits. (Note that this is still an
2415 iterator's responsibility; the iterator framework does not enforce
2416 this.)
2417
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002418- Ctrl+C handling on Windows has been made more consistent with
2419 other platforms. KeyboardInterrupt can now reliably be caught,
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00002420 and Ctrl+C at an interactive prompt no longer terminates the
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002421 process under NT/2k/XP (it never did under Win9x). Ctrl+C will
Tim Peters5af4e6c2002-08-12 02:31:19 +00002422 interrupt time.sleep() in the main thread, and any child processes
2423 created via the popen family (on win2k; we can't make win9x work
Mark Hammond8f3afc72002-08-10 06:26:31 +00002424 reliably) are also interrupted (as generally happens on for Linux/Unix.)
2425 [SF bugs 231273, 439992 and 581232]
Mark Hammondc0e35152002-07-16 01:32:30 +00002426
Mark Hammond8696ebc2002-10-08 02:44:31 +00002427- sys.getwindowsversion() has been added on Windows. This
2428 returns a tuple with information about the version of Windows
2429 currently running.
2430
Raymond Hettinger5a04aec2002-06-25 00:25:30 +00002431- Slices and repetitions of buffer objects now consistently return
2432 a string. Formerly, strings would be returned most of the time,
2433 but a buffer object would be returned when the repetition count
2434 was one or when the slice range was all inclusive.
2435
Walter Dörwald3430d702002-06-17 10:43:59 +00002436- Unicode objects in sys.path are no longer ignored but treated
2437 as directory names.
2438
Neal Norwitz1f68fc72002-06-14 00:50:42 +00002439- Fixed string.startswith and string.endswith builtin methods
2440 so they accept negative indices. [SF bug 493951]
2441
Guido van Rossumc5fe5eb2002-06-12 03:45:21 +00002442- Fixed a bug with a continue inside a try block and a yield in the
2443 finally clause. [SF bug 567538]
2444
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002445- Most builtin sequences now support "extended slices", i.e. slices
Guido van Rossum2e82e712002-06-13 11:41:07 +00002446 with a third "stride" parameter. For example, "hello world"[::-1]
2447 gives "dlrow olleh".
Michael W. Hudson5efaf7e2002-06-11 10:55:12 +00002448
Neal Norwitzd68f5172002-05-29 15:54:55 +00002449- A new warning PendingDeprecationWarning was added to provide
2450 direction on features which are in the process of being deprecated.
2451 The warning will not be printed by default. To see the pending
2452 deprecations, use -Walways::PendingDeprecationWarning::
2453 as a command line option or warnings.filterwarnings() in code.
2454
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00002455- Deprecated features of xrange objects have been removed as
2456 promised. The start, stop, and step attributes and the tolist()
2457 method no longer exist. xrange repetition and slicing have been
2458 removed.
2459
Guido van Rossum7dab2422002-04-26 19:40:56 +00002460- New builtin function enumerate(x), from PEP 279. Example:
2461 enumerate("abc") is an iterator returning (0,"a"), (1,"b"), (2,"c").
2462 The argument can be an arbitrary iterable object.
2463
Neil Schemenauer89e3ee02002-04-26 01:58:53 +00002464- The assert statement no longer tests __debug__ at runtime. This means
2465 that assert statements cannot be disabled by assigning a false value
2466 to __debug__.
2467
Walter Dörwald068325e2002-04-15 13:36:47 +00002468- A method zfill() was added to str and unicode, that fills a numeric
2469 string to the left with zeros. For example,
2470 "+123".zfill(6) -> "+00123".
2471
Guido van Rossum862fe3c2002-04-15 12:36:47 +00002472- Complex numbers supported divmod() and the // and % operators, but
2473 these make no sense. Since this was documented, they're being
2474 deprecated now.
2475
Guido van Rossum26dd8302002-04-26 20:11:29 +00002476- String and unicode methods lstrip(), rstrip() and strip() now take
2477 an optional argument that specifies the characters to strip. For
2478 example, "Foo!!!?!?!?".rstrip("?!") -> "Foo".
Guido van Rossum49042042002-04-13 00:59:05 +00002479
Guido van Rossumc0d3f4e2002-11-27 13:10:40 +00002480- There's a new dictionary constructor (a class method of the dict
2481 class), dict.fromkeys(iterable, value=None). It constructs a
2482 dictionary with keys taken from the iterable and all values set to a
2483 single value. It can be used for building sets and for removing
2484 duplicates from sequences.
Raymond Hettingere33d3df2002-11-27 07:29:33 +00002485
Guido van Rossumc69343b2002-04-12 19:22:48 +00002486- Added a new dict method pop(key). This removes and returns the
2487 value corresponding to key. [SF patch #539949]
2488
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002489- A new built-in type, bool, has been added, as well as built-in
2490 names for its two values, True and False. Comparisons and sundry
2491 other operations that return a truth value have been changed to
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002492 return a bool instead. Read PEP 285 for an explanation of why this
Guido van Rossum47834462002-04-04 15:21:33 +00002493 is backward compatible.
2494
Guido van Rossum95b62a62002-03-29 01:07:24 +00002495- Fixed two bugs reported as SF #535905: under certain conditions,
2496 deallocating a deeply nested structure could cause a segfault in the
2497 garbage collector, due to interaction with the "trashcan" code;
2498 access to the current frame during destruction of a local variable
2499 could access a pointer to freed memory.
2500
Guido van Rossumfe0ca4a2002-06-18 21:20:13 +00002501- The optional object allocator ("pymalloc") has been enabled by
2502 default. The recommended practice for memory allocation and
2503 deallocation has been streamlined. A header file is included,
2504 Misc/pymemcompat.h, which can be bundled with 3rd party extensions
2505 and lets them use the same API with Python versions from 1.5.2
2506 onwards.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00002507
Martin v. Löwiscfeb3b62002-03-03 21:30:27 +00002508- PyErr_Display will provide file and line information for all exceptions
2509 that have an attribute print_file_and_line, not just SyntaxErrors.
2510
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00002511- The UTF-8 codec will now encode and decode Unicode surrogates
2512 correctly and without raising exceptions for unpaired ones.
2513
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00002514- Universal newlines (PEP 278) is implemented. Briefly, using 'U'
2515 instead of 'r' when opening a text file for reading changes the line
2516 ending convention so that any of '\r', '\r\n', and '\n' is
2517 recognized (even mixed in one file); all three are converted to
2518 '\n', the standard Python line end character.
2519
Neal Norwitz649b7592002-01-01 19:07:13 +00002520- file.xreadlines() now raises a ValueError if the file is closed:
2521 Previously, an xreadlines object was returned which would raise
2522 a ValueError when the xreadlines.next() method was called.
2523
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002524- sys.exit() inadvertently allowed more than one argument.
Neal Norwitz0c766a02002-03-27 13:03:09 +00002525 An exception will now be raised if more than one argument is used.
2526
Gustavo Niemeyer17c5a332002-12-16 14:09:22 +00002527- Changed evaluation order of dictionary literals to conform to the
2528 general left to right evaluation order rule. Now {f1(): f2()} will
2529 evaluate f1 first.
Gustavo Niemeyer78429a62002-12-16 13:54:02 +00002530
Gustavo Niemeyer786ddb22002-12-16 18:12:53 +00002531- Fixed bug #521782: when a file was in non-blocking mode, file.read()
2532 could silently lose data or wrongly throw an unknown error.
2533
Neil Schemenauerb983aa02002-12-30 20:22:23 +00002534- The sq_repeat, sq_inplace_repeat, sq_concat and sq_inplace_concat
2535 slots are now always tried after trying the corresponding nb_* slots.
2536 This fixes a number of minor bugs (see bug #624807).
2537
Neal Norwitz74a032e2003-01-10 23:29:48 +00002538- Fix problem with dynamic loading on 64-bit AIX (see bug #639945).
2539
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002540Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002541-----------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002542
Raymond Hettinger9543b342003-01-18 23:22:20 +00002543- Added three operators to the operator module:
2544 operator.pow(a,b) which is equivalent to: a**b.
2545 operator.is_(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is b.
2546 operator.is_not(a,b) which is equivalent to: a is not b.
2547
Martin v. Löwis24a880b2002-12-31 12:55:15 +00002548- posix.openpty now works on all systems that have /dev/ptmx.
2549
Guido van Rossuma3b89532002-12-30 22:59:32 +00002550- A module zipimport exists to support importing code from zip
2551 archives.
2552
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00002553- The new datetime module supplies classes for manipulating dates and
2554 times. The basic design came from the Zope "fishbowl process", and
2555 favors practical commercial applications over calendar esoterica. See
2556
2557 http://www.zope.org/Members/fdrake/DateTimeWiki/FrontPage
2558
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002559- _tkinter now returns Tcl objects, instead of strings. Objects which
2560 have Python equivalents are converted to Python objects, other objects
2561 are wrapped. This can be configured through the wantobjects method,
Martin v. Löwis8c8aa5d2002-11-26 21:39:48 +00002562 or Tkinter.wantobjects.
Martin v. Löwisffad6332002-11-26 09:28:05 +00002563
Barry Warsawc27f4bd2002-12-30 21:03:26 +00002564- The PyBSDDB wrapper around the Sleepycat Berkeley DB library has
2565 been added as the package bsddb. The traditional bsddb module is
2566 still available in source code, but not built automatically anymore,
2567 and is now named bsddb185. This supports Berkeley DB versions from
Skip Montanaro13b29102003-02-03 15:17:25 +00002568 3.0 to 4.1. For help converting your databases from the old module (which
2569 probably used an obsolete version of Berkeley DB) to the new module, see
2570 the db2pickle.py and pickle2db.py scripts described in the Tools/Demos
2571 section above.
Martin v. Löwisef546b32002-11-19 08:12:57 +00002572
Martin v. Löwis677bde22002-11-23 22:08:15 +00002573- unicodedata was updated to Unicode 3.2. It supports normalization
2574 and names for Hangul syllables and CJK unified ideographs.
Martin v. Löwis7d41e292002-11-23 12:22:32 +00002575
Neal Norwitz94a83fd2002-11-02 17:46:24 +00002576- resource.getrlimit() now returns longs instead of ints.
2577
Martin v. Löwis080689c2002-10-26 14:42:02 +00002578- readline now dynamically adjusts its input/output stream if
2579 sys.stdin/stdout changes.
2580
Guido van Rossumba602972002-10-01 18:18:58 +00002581- The _tkinter module (and hence Tkinter) has dropped support for
2582 Tcl/Tk 8.0 and 8.1. Only Tcl/Tk versions 8.2, 8.3 and 8.4 are
2583 supported.
2584
Martin v. Löwis658009a2002-09-16 17:26:24 +00002585- cPickle.BadPickleGet is now a class.
2586
Martin v. Löwisa19bfe02002-10-16 18:28:36 +00002587- The time stamps in os.stat_result are floating point numbers
2588 after stat_float_times has been called.
Martin v. Löwis94717ed2002-09-09 14:24:16 +00002589
Neal Norwitzb5673922002-09-05 21:48:07 +00002590- If the size passed to mmap.mmap() is larger than the length of the
2591 file on non-Windows platforms, a ValueError is raised. [SF bug 585792]
2592
Guido van Rossumb57089c2002-08-06 16:20:26 +00002593- The xreadlines module is slated for obsolescence.
2594
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002595- The strptime function in the time module is now always available (a
2596 Python implementation is used when the C library doesn't define it).
2597
Guido van Rossum9562bcf2002-06-14 21:31:18 +00002598- The 'new' module is no longer an extension, but a Python module that
2599 only exists for backwards compatibility. Its contents are no longer
2600 functions but callable type objects.
2601
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002602- The bsddb.*open functions can now take 'None' as a filename.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002603 This will create a temporary in-memory bsddb that won't be
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002604 written to disk.
Anthony Baxter83888952002-04-23 02:11:05 +00002605
Martin v. Löwisb96152c2002-12-31 13:20:15 +00002606- posix.getloadavg, posix.lchown, posix.killpg, posix.mknod, and
2607 posix.getpgid have been added where available.
Martin v. Löwis06a83e92002-04-14 10:19:44 +00002608
Martin v. Löwisf0a46682002-11-03 17:20:12 +00002609- The locale module now exposes the C library's gettext interface. It
2610 also has a new function getpreferredencoding.
Martin v. Löwis2e64c342002-03-27 18:49:02 +00002611
Tim Petersfbf74f22002-03-14 19:06:01 +00002612- A security hole ("double free") was found in zlib-1.1.3, a popular
2613 third party compression library used by some Python modules. The
2614 hole was quickly plugged in zlib-1.1.4, and the Windows build of
2615 Python now ships with zlib-1.1.4.
2616
Martin v. Löwis688357e2002-04-08 21:28:20 +00002617- pwd, grp, and resource return enhanced tuples now, with symbolic
2618 field names.
Martin v. Löwis29001ff2002-03-01 10:47:37 +00002619
Martin v. Löwis99866332002-03-01 10:27:01 +00002620- array.array is now a type object. A new format character
2621 'u' indicates Py_UNICODE arrays. For those, .tounicode and
2622 .fromunicode methods are available. Arrays now support __iadd__
2623 and __imul__.
2624
Neal Norwitze790eae2002-01-01 21:14:12 +00002625- dl now builds on every system that has dlfcn.h. Failure in case
Martin v. Löwis93227272002-01-01 20:18:30 +00002626 of sizeof(int)!=sizeof(long)!=sizeof(void*) is delayed until dl.open
2627 is called.
2628
Skip Montanaro8e790e72002-09-03 13:25:17 +00002629- The sys module acquired a new attribute, api_version, which evaluates
2630 to the value of the PYTHON_API_VERSION macro with which the
2631 interpreter was compiled.
2632
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002633- Fixed bug #470582: sre module would return a tuple (None, 'a', 'ab')
2634 when applying the regular expression '^((a)c)?(ab)$' on 'ab'. It now
2635 returns (None, None, 'ab'), as expected. Also fixed handling of
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002636 lastindex/lastgroup match attributes in similar cases. For example,
Gustavo Niemeyer4e7be062002-11-06 14:06:53 +00002637 when running the expression r'(a)(b)?b' over 'ab', lastindex must be
2638 1, not 2.
2639
Gustavo Niemeyerc523b042002-11-07 03:28:56 +00002640- Fixed bug #581080: sre scanner was not checking the buffer limit
2641 before increasing the current pointer. This was creating an infinite
2642 loop in the search function, once the pointer exceeded the buffer
2643 limit.
2644
Thomas Heller95cb7e42002-11-07 16:23:55 +00002645- The os.fdopen function now enforces a file mode starting with the
2646 letter 'r', 'w' or 'a', otherwise a ValueError is raised. This fixes
2647 bug #623464.
2648
Greg Ward6c58d462003-01-03 18:02:15 +00002649- The linuxaudiodev module is now deprecated; it is being replaced by
2650 ossaudiodev. The interface has been extended to cover a lot more of
2651 OSS (see www.opensound.com), including most DSP ioctls and the
2652 OSS mixer API. Documentation forthcoming in 2.3a2.
2653
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002654Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002655-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002656
Guido van Rossum747f8062003-01-03 16:33:49 +00002657- imaplib.py now supports SSL (Tino Lange and Piers Lauder).
2658
Just van Rossum5e156ad2002-12-31 16:38:01 +00002659- Freeze's modulefinder.py has been moved to the standard library;
2660 slightly improved so it will issue less false missing submodule
2661 reports (see sf path #643711 for details). Documentation will follow
2662 with Python 2.3a2.
2663
Martin v. Löwis96a60e42002-12-31 13:11:54 +00002664- os.path exposes getctime.
2665
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002666- unittest.py now has two additional methods called assertAlmostEqual()
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002667 and failIfAlmostEqual(). They implement an approximate comparison
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002668 by rounding the difference between the two arguments and comparing
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002669 the result to zero. Approximate comparison is essential for
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00002670 unit tests of floating point results.
2671
Raymond Hettingere11b5102002-12-25 16:37:19 +00002672- calendar.py now depends on the new datetime module rather than
2673 the time module. As a result, the range of allowable dates
2674 has been increased.
2675
Michael W. Hudsoncfd38842002-12-17 16:15:34 +00002676- pdb has a new 'j(ump)' command to select the next line to be
2677 executed.
2678
Thomas Heller1b3b49d2002-12-12 19:13:44 +00002679- The distutils created windows installers now can run a
2680 postinstallation script.
2681
Martin v. Löwis4581cfa2002-11-22 08:23:09 +00002682- doctest.testmod can now be called without argument, which means to
2683 test the current module.
2684
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00002685- When canceling a server that implemented threading with a keyboard
Martin v. Löwisf86e8ef2002-11-22 08:08:44 +00002686 interrupt, the server would shut down but not terminate (waiting on
2687 client threads). A new member variable, daemon_threads, was added to
2688 the ThreadingMixIn class in SocketServer.py to make it explicit that
2689 this behavior needs to be controlled.
2690
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002691- A new module, optparse, provides a fancy alternative to getopt for
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002692 command line parsing. It is a slightly modified version of Greg
Guido van Rossum545c2502002-11-15 13:19:58 +00002693 Ward's Optik package.
2694
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002695- UserDict.py now defines a DictMixin class which defines all dictionary
2696 methods for classes that already have a minimum mapping interface.
2697 This greatly simplifies writing classes that need to be substitutable
2698 for dictionaries (such as the shelve module).
2699
2700- shelve.py now subclasses from UserDict.DictMixin. Now shelve supports
2701 all dictionary methods. This eases the transition to persistent
Andrew M. Kuchlinge0373f82002-11-15 14:42:34 +00002702 storage for scripts originally written with dictionaries in mind.
Raymond Hettinger79947162002-11-15 06:46:14 +00002703
Skip Montanaro3bf99e32002-12-08 18:36:24 +00002704- shelve.open and the various classes in shelve.py now accept an optional
2705 binary flag, which defaults to False. If True, the values stored in the
2706 shelf are binary pickles.
2707
Guido van Rossumfda06742002-11-13 16:29:18 +00002708- A new package, logging, implements the logging API defined by PEP
2709 282. The code is written by Vinay Sajip.
2710
Walter Dörwald4dbf1922002-11-06 16:53:44 +00002711- StreamReader, StreamReaderWriter and StreamRecoder in the codecs
2712 modules are iterators now.
2713
Tim Peters9288f952002-11-05 20:38:55 +00002714- gzip.py now handles files exceeding 2GB. Files over 4GB also work
2715 now (provided the OS supports it, and Python is configured with large
2716 file support), but in that case the underlying gzip file format can
2717 record only the least-significant 32 bits of the file size, so that
2718 some tools working with gzipped files may report an incorrect file
2719 size.
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002720
Martin v. Löwis74b51ac2002-10-26 14:50:45 +00002721- xml.sax.saxutils.unescape has been added, to replace entity references
2722 with their entity value.
2723
Martin v. Löwis77ac4292002-10-15 15:11:13 +00002724- Queue.Queue.{put,get} now support an optional timeout argument.
2725
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002726- Various features of Tk 8.4 are exposed in Tkinter.py. The multiple
2727 option of tkFileDialog is exposed as function askopenfile{,name}s.
Martin v. Löwis2ec36272002-10-13 10:22:08 +00002728
Martin v. Löwisb24e3472002-10-13 10:28:04 +00002729- Various configure methods of Tkinter have been stream-lined, so that
2730 tag_configure, image_configure, window_configure now return a
Tim Petersfb0ea522002-11-04 19:50:11 +00002731 dictionary when invoked with no argument.
Martin v. Löwis6ce13152002-10-10 14:36:13 +00002732
Guido van Rossum2b492b62002-10-09 21:40:48 +00002733- Importing the readline module now no longer has the side effect of
2734 calling setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""). The initial "C" locale, or
2735 whatever locale is explicitly set by the user, is preserved. If you
2736 want repr() of 8-bit strings in your preferred encoding to preserve
2737 all printable characters of that encoding, you have to add the
2738 following code to your $PYTHONSTARTUP file or to your application's
2739 main():
2740
2741 import locale
2742 locale.setlocale(locale.LC_CTYPE, "")
2743
Martin v. Löwise9ce0b02002-10-07 13:23:24 +00002744- shutil.move was added. shutil.copytree now reports errors as an
2745 exception at the end, instead of printing error messages.
2746
Marc-André Lemburg97047e22002-10-04 11:55:21 +00002747- Encoding name normalization was generalized to not only
2748 replace hyphens with underscores, but also all other non-alphanumeric
2749 characters (with the exception of the dot which is used for Python
2750 package names during lookup). The aliases.py mapping was updated
2751 to the new standard.
2752
Walter Dörwald5ccaf8f2002-09-06 16:15:58 +00002753- mimetypes has two new functions: guess_all_extensions() which
2754 returns a list of all known extensions for a mime type, and
2755 add_type() which adds one mapping between a mime type and
2756 an extension to the database.
2757
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002758- New module: sets, defines the class Set that implements a mutable
2759 set type using the keys of a dict to represent the set. There's
2760 also a class ImmutableSet which is useful when you need sets of sets
2761 or when you need to use sets as dict keys, and a class BaseSet which
Raymond Hettingeref8b9c62002-12-09 08:56:06 +00002762 is the base class of the two.
Guido van Rossumd8ab35c2002-08-19 16:25:46 +00002763
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002764- Added random.sample(population,k) for random sampling without replacement.
Tim Petersb9099c32002-11-12 22:08:10 +00002765 Returns a k length list of unique elements chosen from the population.
Raymond Hettingerf24eb352002-11-12 17:41:57 +00002766
Tim Peters012c0a32002-08-16 03:40:07 +00002767- random.randrange(-sys.maxint-1, sys.maxint) no longer raises
2768 OverflowError. That is, it now accepts any combination of 'start'
2769 and 'stop' arguments so long as each is in the range of Python's
2770 bounded integers.
2771
Raymond Hettinger40f62172002-12-29 23:03:38 +00002772- Thanks to Raymond Hettinger, random.random() now uses a new core
2773 generator. The Mersenne Twister algorithm is implemented in C,
2774 threadsafe, faster than the previous generator, has an astronomically
2775 large period (2**19937-1), creates random floats to full 53-bit
2776 precision, and may be the most widely tested random number generator
2777 in existence.
2778
2779 The random.jumpahead(n) method has different semantics for the new
2780 generator. Instead of jumping n steps ahead, it uses n and the
2781 existing state to create a new state. This means that jumpahead()
2782 continues to support multi-threaded code needing generators of
2783 non-overlapping sequences. However, it will break code which relies
2784 on jumpahead moving a specific number of steps forward.
2785
2786 The attributes random.whseed and random.__whseed have no meaning for
2787 the new generator. Code using these attributes should switch to a
2788 new class, random.WichmannHill which is provided for backward
2789 compatibility and to make an alternate generator available.
2790
Guido van Rossum4a57c332002-08-02 18:05:20 +00002791- New "algorithms" module: heapq, implements a heap queue. Thanks to
2792 Kevin O'Connor for the code and François Pinard for an entertaining
2793 write-up explaining the theory and practical uses of heaps.
2794
Marc-André Lemburg58e2ff22002-07-12 14:40:04 +00002795- New encoding for the Palm OS character set: palmos.
2796
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002797- binascii.crc32() and the zipfile module had problems on some 64-bit
2798 platforms. These have been fixed. On a platform with 8-byte C longs,
2799 crc32() now returns a signed-extended 4-byte result, so that its value
2800 as a Python int is equal to the value computed a 32-bit platform.
2801
Martin v. Löwis7d650ca2002-06-30 15:05:00 +00002802- xml.dom.minidom.toxml and toprettyxml now take an optional encoding
2803 argument.
2804
Guido van Rossum9f7549b2002-06-10 21:39:42 +00002805- Some fixes in the copy module: when an object is copied through its
2806 __reduce__ method, there was no check for a __setstate__ method on
2807 the result [SF patch 565085]; deepcopy should treat instances of
2808 custom metaclasses the same way it treats instances of type 'type'
2809 [SF patch 560794].
2810
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002811- Sockets now support timeout mode. After s.settimeout(T), where T is
2812 a float expressing seconds, subsequent operations raise an exception
2813 if they cannot be completed within T seconds. To disable timeout
Guido van Rossum79f0a102002-07-23 03:32:08 +00002814 mode, use s.settimeout(None). There's also a module function,
2815 socket.setdefaulttimeout(T), which sets the default for all sockets
2816 created henceforth.
Guido van Rossum5033c8e2002-06-07 12:40:52 +00002817
2818- getopt.gnu_getopt was added. This supports GNU-style option
2819 processing, where options can be mixed with non-option arguments.
Martin v. Löwis446a25f2002-06-06 10:58:36 +00002820
Michael W. Hudsonb0dc1a32002-06-04 18:27:35 +00002821- Stop using strings for exceptions. String objects used for
2822 exceptions are now classes deriving from Exception. The objects
2823 changed were: Tkinter.TclError, bdb.BdbQuit, macpath.norm_error,
2824 tabnanny.NannyNag, and xdrlib.Error.
Neal Norwitzb5b5a262002-06-04 17:14:07 +00002825
Walter Dörwald474458d2002-06-04 15:16:29 +00002826- Constants BOM_UTF8, BOM_UTF16, BOM_UTF16_LE, BOM_UTF16_BE,
2827 BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
2828 Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
2829 big endian systems were added to the codecs module. The old names
2830 BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
2831
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002832- Added conversion functions math.degrees() and math.radians().
Raymond Hettinger87f59ee2002-05-13 04:17:32 +00002833
Raymond Hettinger866964c2002-12-14 19:51:34 +00002834- math.log() now takes an optional argument: math.log(x[, base]).
2835
Raymond Hettinger9b1df1d2002-05-12 06:07:21 +00002836- ftplib.retrlines() now tests for callback is None rather than testing
2837 for False. Was causing an error when given a callback object which
2838 was callable but also returned len() as zero. The change may
2839 create new breakage if the caller relied on the undocumented behavior
2840 and called with callback set to [] or some other False value not
2841 identical to None.
2842
Tim Peters46c04e12002-05-05 20:40:00 +00002843- random.gauss() uses a piece of hidden state used by nothing else,
2844 and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
2845 words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
2846 results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
2847 mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
2848 results now.
2849
Fred Drake7f781c92002-05-01 20:33:53 +00002850- The pickle.Pickler class grew a clear_memo() method to mimic that
2851 provided by cPickle.Pickler.
2852
Tim Peters81b92512002-04-29 01:37:32 +00002853- difflib's SequenceMatcher class now does a dynamic analysis of
2854 which elements are so frequent as to constitute noise. For
2855 comparing files as sequences of lines, this generally works better
2856 than the IS_LINE_JUNK function, and function ndiff's linejunk
2857 argument defaults to None now as a result. A happy benefit is
2858 that SequenceMatcher may run much faster now when applied
2859 to large files with many duplicate lines (for example, C program
2860 text with lots of repeated "}" and "return NULL;" lines).
2861
Guido van Rossum256705b2002-04-23 13:29:43 +00002862- New Text.dump() method in Tkinter module.
2863
Marc-André Lemburg1ec71ea2002-04-17 20:33:40 +00002864- New distutils commands for building packagers were added to
2865 support pkgtool on Solaris and swinstall on HP-UX.
2866
2867- distutils now has a new abstract binary packager base class
2868 command/bdist_packager, which simplifies writing packagers.
2869 This will hopefully provide the missing bits to encourage
2870 people to submit more packagers, e.g. for Debian, FreeBSD
2871 and other systems.
2872
Guido van Rossumf9257822002-06-18 20:43:18 +00002873- The UTF-16, -LE and -BE stream readers now raise a
2874 NotImplementedError for all calls to .readline(). Previously, they
2875 used to just produce garbage or fail with an encoding error --
2876 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 +00002877 work well with these.
2878
Martin v. Löwis5c137c22002-03-18 12:44:08 +00002879- compileall now supports quiet operation.
2880
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00002881- The BaseHTTPServer now implements optional HTTP/1.1 persistent
Martin v. Löwis587c98c2002-03-17 18:37:22 +00002882 connections.
2883
Marc-André Lemburga5d2b4c2002-02-16 18:23:30 +00002884- socket module: the SSL support was broken out of the main
2885 _socket module C helper and placed into a new _ssl helper
2886 which now gets imported by socket.py if available and working.
2887
Marc-André Lemburg37aa5802002-02-10 21:42:47 +00002888- encodings package: added aliases for all supported IANA character
2889 sets
2890
Guido van Rossum606fe4e2001-12-28 20:57:14 +00002891- ftplib: to safeguard the user's privacy, anonymous login will use
2892 "anonymous@" as default password, rather than the real user and host
2893 name.
2894
Fred Drake36736122002-01-10 13:50:31 +00002895- webbrowser: tightened up the command passed to os.system() so that
2896 arbitrary shell code can't be executed because a bogus URL was
2897 passed in.
2898
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00002899- gettext.translation has an optional fallback argument, and
Martin v. Löwisa55ffae2002-01-11 06:58:49 +00002900 gettext.find an optional all argument. Translations will now fallback
Martin v. Löwisd8996052002-11-21 21:45:32 +00002901 on a per-message basis. The module supports plural forms, by means
2902 of gettext.[d]ngettext and Translation.[u]ngettext.
Martin v. Löwis1be64192002-01-11 06:33:28 +00002903
Martin v. Löwis9668b932002-01-12 11:27:42 +00002904- distutils bdist commands now offer a --skip-build option.
2905
Walter Dörwaldb25c2b02002-03-21 10:38:40 +00002906- warnings.warn now accepts a Warning instance as first argument.
2907
Fred Drakefed7e852002-04-04 19:36:15 +00002908- The xml.sax.expatreader.ExpatParser class will no longer create
2909 circular references by using itself as the locator that gets passed
2910 to the content handler implementation. [SF bug #535474]
2911
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002912- The email.Parser.Parser class now properly parses strings regardless
2913 of their line endings, which can be any of \r, \n, or \r\n (CR, LF,
2914 or CRLF). Also, the Header class's constructor default arguments
2915 has changed slightly so that an explicit maxlinelen value is always
Barry Warsaw497e5c42002-12-30 19:27:08 +00002916 honored, and so unicode conversion error handling can be specified.
Barry Warsaw47f3e2c2002-05-20 00:14:24 +00002917
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002918- distutils' build_ext command now links C++ extensions with the C++
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002919 compiler available in the Makefile or CXX environment variable, if
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002920 running under \*nix.
Gustavo Niemeyerf8ca8362002-11-05 16:50:05 +00002921
2922- New module bz2: provides a comprehensive interface for the bz2 compression
2923 library. It implements a complete file interface, one-shot (de)compression
2924 functions, and types for sequential (de)compression.
2925
David Goodgerf349e262003-01-03 03:30:21 +00002926- New pdb command 'pp' which is like 'p' except that it pretty-prints
Barry Warsaw5d8d6182002-11-05 22:41:33 +00002927 the value of its expression argument.
2928
Gustavo Niemeyerfbceb012002-11-06 18:44:26 +00002929- Now bdist_rpm distutils command understands a verify_script option in
2930 the config file, including the contents of the referred filename in
2931 the "%verifyscript" section of the rpm spec file.
2932
Gustavo Niemeyer1456fde2002-11-25 17:25:04 +00002933- Fixed bug #495695: webbrowser module would run graphic browsers in a
2934 unix environment even if DISPLAY was not set. Also, support for
2935 skipstone browser was included.
2936
Gustavo Niemeyerd5ae01a2002-12-16 13:11:57 +00002937- Fixed bug #636769: rexec would run unallowed code if subclasses of
2938 strings were used as parameters for certain functions.
2939
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002940Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002941-----------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002942
Martin v. Löwis0d1fdea2002-11-22 08:36:54 +00002943- pygettext.py now supports globbing on Windows, and accepts module
2944 names in addition to accepting file names.
2945
Guido van Rossum923e4ef2002-09-17 20:58:59 +00002946- The SGI demos (Demo/sgi) have been removed. Nobody thought they
2947 were interesting any more. (The SGI library modules and extensions
2948 are still there; it is believed that at least some of these are
2949 still used and useful.)
2950
Fred Drake40813b12002-08-05 15:24:19 +00002951- IDLE supports the new encoding declarations (PEP 263); it can also
2952 deal with legacy 8-bit files if they use the locale's encoding. It
2953 allows non-ASCII strings in the interactive shell and executes them
2954 in the locale's encoding.
Martin v. Löwis98ce7b72002-08-05 15:11:26 +00002955
Marc-André Lemburg46260092002-04-04 16:17:11 +00002956- freeze.py now produces binaries which can import shared modules,
2957 unlike before when this failed due to missing symbol exports in
2958 the generated binary.
2959
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002960Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00002961-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00002962
Martin v. Löwisdc461752002-11-06 21:59:33 +00002963- On Unix, IDLE is now installed automatically.
2964
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002965- The fpectl module is not built by default; it's dangerous or useless
2966 except in the hands of experts.
2967
Tim Petersf47630f2002-08-01 02:34:51 +00002968- The public Python C API will generally be declared using PyAPI_FUNC
Guido van Rossum6b3db552002-09-25 15:02:44 +00002969 and PyAPI_DATA macros, while Python extension module init functions
2970 will be declared with PyMODINIT_FUNC. DL_EXPORT/DL_IMPORT macros
2971 are deprecated.
Neal Norwitz1389f3e2002-07-22 13:21:10 +00002972
Tim Petersc6a3ff62002-07-08 22:11:52 +00002973- A bug was fixed that could cause COUNT_ALLOCS builds to segfault, or
2974 get into infinite loops, when a new-style class got garbage-collected.
2975 Unfortunately, to avoid this, the way COUNT_ALLOCS works requires
2976 that new-style classes be immortal in COUNT_ALLOCS builds. Note that
2977 COUNT_ALLOCS is not enabled by default, in either release or debug
2978 builds, and that new-style classes are immortal only in COUNT_ALLOCS
2979 builds.
2980
Tim Peters943382c2002-07-07 03:59:34 +00002981- Compiling out the cyclic garbage collector is no longer an option.
2982 The old symbol WITH_CYCLE_GC is now ignored, and Python.h arranges
2983 that it's always defined (for the benefit of any extension modules
2984 that may be conditionalizing on it). A bonus is that any extension
2985 type participating in cyclic gc can choose to participate in the
2986 Py_TRASHCAN mechanism now too; in the absence of cyclic gc, this used
2987 to require editing the core to teach the trashcan mechanism about the
2988 new type.
2989
Martin v. Löwis0cec0ff2002-07-28 16:33:45 +00002990- According to Annex F of the current C standard,
Tim Peters1de41bf2002-07-03 03:31:20 +00002991
2992 The Standard C macro HUGE_VAL and its float and long double analogs,
2993 HUGE_VALF and HUGE_VALL, expand to expressions whose values are
2994 positive infinities.
2995
2996 Python only uses the double HUGE_VAL, and only to #define its own symbol
2997 Py_HUGE_VAL. Some platforms have incorrect definitions for HUGE_VAL.
2998 pyport.h used to try to worm around that, but the workarounds triggered
2999 other bugs on other platforms, so we gave up. If your platform defines
3000 HUGE_VAL incorrectly, you'll need to #define Py_HUGE_VAL to something
3001 that works on your platform. The only instance of this I'm sure about
3002 is on an unknown subset of Cray systems, described here:
3003
3004 http://www.cray.com/swpubs/manuals/SN-2194_2.0/html-SN-2194_2.0/x3138.htm
3005
3006 Presumably 2.3a1 breaks such systems. If anyone uses such a system, help!
3007
Martin v. Löwisa3fb4f72002-06-09 13:33:54 +00003008- The configure option --without-doc-strings can be used to remove the
3009 doc strings from the builtin functions and modules; this reduces the
3010 size of the executable.
3011
Guido van Rossumadd88062002-08-15 14:01:14 +00003012- The universal newlines option (PEP 278) is on by default. On Unix
3013 it can be disabled by passing --without-universal-newlines to the
3014 configure script. On other platforms, remove
3015 WITH_UNIVERSAL_NEWLINES from pyconfig.h.
Tim Peters639295f2002-04-21 07:30:30 +00003016
Martin v. Löwis1142de32002-03-29 16:28:31 +00003017- On Unix, a shared libpython2.3.so can be created with --enable-shared.
3018
Tim Peters8deda702002-03-30 10:06:07 +00003019- All uses of the CACHE_HASH, INTERN_STRINGS, and DONT_SHARE_SHORT_STRINGS
3020 preprocessor symbols were eliminated. The internal decisions they
3021 controlled stopped being experimental long ago.
Tim Peters1f7df352002-03-29 03:29:08 +00003022
Fred Drake7d28b732002-05-02 21:17:00 +00003023- The tools used to build the documentation now work under Cygwin as
3024 well as Unix.
3025
Skip Montanaro57454e52002-06-14 20:30:31 +00003026- The bsddb and dbm module builds have been changed to try and avoid version
3027 skew problems and disable linkage with Berkeley DB 1.85 unless the
3028 installer knows what s/he's doing. See the section on building these
3029 modules in the README file for details.
3030
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003031C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003032-----
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003033
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003034- PyNumber_Check() now returns true for string and unicode objects.
3035 This is a result of these types having a partially defined
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003036 tp_as_number slot. (This is not a feature, but an indication that
Walter Dörwalda1a61f92002-11-19 21:20:25 +00003037 PyNumber_Check() is not very useful to determine numeric behavior.
Guido van Rossum1d267402002-11-18 16:27:16 +00003038 It may be deprecated.)
Neil Schemenauer6c194762002-11-18 16:19:39 +00003039
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003040- The string object's layout has changed: the pointer member
3041 ob_sinterned has been replaced by an int member ob_sstate. On some
3042 platforms (e.g. most 64-bit systems) this may change the offset of
3043 the ob_sval member, so as a precaution the API_VERSION has been
3044 incremented. The apparently unused feature of "indirect interned
3045 strings", supported by the ob_sinterned member, is gone. Interned
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003046 strings are now usually mortal; there is a new API,
Guido van Rossum45ec02a2002-08-19 21:43:18 +00003047 PyString_InternImmortal() that creates immortal interned strings.
3048 (The ob_sstate member can only take three values; however, while
3049 making it a char saves a few bytes per string object on average, in
3050 it also slowed things down a bit because ob_sval was no longer
3051 aligned.)
3052
Guido van Rossumfdb86482002-08-14 21:20:32 +00003053- The Py_InitModule*() functions now accept NULL for the 'methods'
3054 argument. Modules without global functions are becoming more common
3055 now that factories can be types rather than functions.
3056
Marc-André Lemburgcc8764c2002-08-11 12:23:04 +00003057- New C API PyUnicode_FromOrdinal() which exposes unichr() at C
3058 level.
3059
Thomas Heller085358a2002-07-29 14:27:41 +00003060- New functions PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr() and
3061 PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename(). Similar to
3062 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
3063 PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
3064 the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
3065
Tim Peters7c321a82002-07-09 02:57:01 +00003066- Py_FatalError() is now declared as taking a const char* argument. It
3067 was previously declared without const. This should not affect working
3068 code.
3069
Martin v. Löwis01f94bd2002-05-08 08:44:21 +00003070- Added new macro PySequence_ITEM(o, i) that directly calls
3071 sq_item without rechecking that o is a sequence and without
3072 adjusting for negative indices.
3073
Fred Draked0ba6362002-05-02 21:28:26 +00003074- PyRange_New() now raises ValueError if the fourth argument is not 1.
3075 This is part of the removal of deprecated features of the xrange
3076 object.
3077
Guido van Rossum517c7d42002-04-26 02:49:14 +00003078- PyNumber_Coerce() and PyNumber_CoerceEx() now also invoke the type's
3079 coercion if both arguments have the same type but this type has the
3080 CHECKTYPES flag set. This is to better support proxies.
3081
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003082- The type of tp_free has been changed from "``void (*)(PyObject *)``" to
3083 "``void (*)(void *)``".
Neil Schemenauer9344b142002-04-12 23:00:08 +00003084
3085- PyObject_Del, PyObject_GC_Del are now functions instead of macros.
3086
Guido van Rossum0986d822002-04-08 01:38:42 +00003087- A type can now inherit its metatype from its base type. Previously,
3088 when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
3089 was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
3090 where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
3091
3092- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
3093
Neil Schemenauerc9abc1d2002-05-08 14:14:41 +00003094- The PyCore_* family of APIs have been removed.
Neil Schemenauer9d50d132002-03-22 17:06:59 +00003095
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003096- The "u#" parser marker will now pass through Unicode objects as-is
Marc-André Lemburg3e3eacb2002-01-09 16:21:27 +00003097 without going through the buffer API.
3098
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003099- The enumerators of cmp_op have been renamed to use the prefix ``PyCmp_``.
Martin v. Löwis7198a522002-01-01 19:59:11 +00003100
Tim Peters10a3bb52001-12-25 19:07:38 +00003101- An old #define of ANY as void has been removed from pyport.h. This
3102 hasn't been used since Python's pre-ANSI days, and the #define has
3103 been marked as obsolete since then. SF bug 495548 says it created
3104 conflicts with other packages, so keeping it around wasn't harmless.
3105
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003106- Because Python's magic number scheme broke on January 1st, we decided
3107 to stop Python development. Thanks for all the fish!
3108
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003109- Some of us don't like fish, so we changed Python's magic number
Marc-André Lemburge92e0a92002-02-09 11:28:43 +00003110 scheme to a new one. See Python/import.c for details.
3111
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003112New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003113-------------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003114
Martin v. Löwis79acb9e2002-12-06 12:48:53 +00003115- OpenVMS is now supported.
3116
Martin v. Löwisf90ae202002-06-11 06:22:31 +00003117- AtheOS is now supported.
3118
Andrew MacIntyre161ad0e2002-08-04 07:25:58 +00003119- the EMX runtime environment on OS/2 is now supported.
3120
Martin v. Löwisa6e97582002-01-01 18:41:33 +00003121- GNU/Hurd is now supported.
3122
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003123Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003124-----
3125
Fred Drake4dd0f7e2002-11-26 21:44:56 +00003126- The regrtest.py script's -u option now provides a way to say "allow
3127 all resources except this one." For example, to allow everything
3128 except bsddb, give the option '-uall,-bsddb'.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003129
3130Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003131-------
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003132
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003133- The Windows distribution now ships with version 4.0.14 of the
3134 Sleepycat Berkeley database library. This should be a huge
3135 improvement over the previous Berkeley DB 1.85, which had many
3136 bugs.
3137 XXX What are the licensing issues here?
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003138 XXX If a user has a database created with a previous version of
Tim Peters84c7a3f2002-11-23 18:48:06 +00003139 XXX Python, what must they do to convert it?
3140 XXX I'm still not sure how to link this thing (see PCbuild/readme.txt).
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003141 XXX The version # is likely to change before 2.3a1.
Tim Peterse820cb62002-12-16 20:57:22 +00003142
3143- The Windows distribution now ships with a Secure Sockets Library (SLL)
Mark Hammondc3de0082002-12-03 06:16:08 +00003144 module (_ssl.pyd)
Tim Peters19cf4ee2002-11-23 03:49:08 +00003145
Tim Peters857fb4c2002-11-14 23:31:58 +00003146- The Windows distribution now ships with Tcl/Tk version 8.4.1 (it
3147 previously shipped with Tcl/Tk 8.3.2).
3148
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003149- When Python is built under a Microsoft compiler, sys.version now
3150 includes the compiler version number (_MSC_VER). For example, under
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003151 MSVC 6, sys.version contains the substring "MSC v.1200 ". 1200 is
Tim Peters37dfb012002-11-11 19:51:33 +00003152 the value of _MSC_VER under MSVC 6.
3153
Tim Peters08e72952002-04-16 20:48:01 +00003154- Sometimes the uninstall executable (UNWISE.EXE) vanishes. One cause
3155 of that has been fixed in the installer (disabled Wise's "delete in-
3156 use files" uninstall option).
3157
Guido van Rossum181e41a2002-04-06 00:23:25 +00003158- Fixed a bug in urllib's proxy handling in Windows. [SF bug #503031]
3159
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003160- The installer now installs Start menu shortcuts under (the local
3161 equivalent of) "All Users" when doing an Admin install.
3162
Tim Petersfb05db22002-03-11 00:24:00 +00003163- file.truncate([newsize]) now works on Windows for all newsize values.
3164 It used to fail if newsize didn't fit in 32 bits, reflecting a
3165 limitation of MS _chsize (which is no longer used).
3166
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003167- os.waitpid() is now implemented for Windows, and can be used to block
3168 until a specified process exits. This is similar to, but not exactly
3169 the same as, os.waitpid() on POSIX systems. If you're waiting for
3170 a specific process whose pid was obtained from one of the spawn()
3171 functions, the same Python os.waitpid() code works across platforms.
Tim Peters33187922002-04-04 20:02:04 +00003172 See the docs for details. The docs were changed to clarify that
3173 spawn functions return, and waitpid requires, a process handle on
3174 Windows (not the same thing as a Windows process id).
Tim Petersab034fa2002-02-01 11:27:43 +00003175
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003176- New tempfile.TemporaryFile implementation for Windows: this doesn't
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003177 need a TemporaryFileWrapper wrapper anymore, and should be immune
Tim Peters11bd9942002-02-01 00:52:29 +00003178 to a nasty problem: before 2.3, if you got a temp file on Windows, it
3179 got wrapped in an object whose close() method first closed the
3180 underlying file, then deleted the file. This usually worked fine.
3181 However, the spawn family of functions on Windows create (at a low C
3182 level) the same set of open files in the spawned process Q as were
3183 open in the spawning process P. If a temp file f was among them, then
3184 doing f.close() in P first closed P's C-level file handle on f, but Q's
3185 C-level file handle on f remained open, so the attempt in P to delete f
3186 blew up with a "Permission denied" error (Windows doesn't allow
3187 deleting open files). This was surprising, subtle, and difficult to
3188 work around.
3189
3190- The os module now exports all the symbolic constants usable with the
3191 low-level os.open() on Windows: the new constants in 2.3 are
3192 O_NOINHERIT, O_SHORT_LIVED, O_TEMPORARY, O_RANDOM and O_SEQUENTIAL.
3193 The others were also available in 2.2: O_APPEND, O_BINARY, O_CREAT,
3194 O_EXCL, O_RDONLY, O_RDWR, O_TEXT, O_TRUNC and O_WRONLY. Contrary
3195 to Microsoft docs, O_SHORT_LIVED does not seem to imply O_TEMPORARY
3196 (so specify both if you want both; note that neither is useful unless
3197 specified with O_CREAT too).
3198
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003199Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003200----
3201
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003202- Mac/Relnotes is gone, the release notes are now here.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003203
Just van Rossume1ebd802003-02-10 10:06:18 +00003204- Python (the OSX-only, unix-based version, not the OS9-compatible CFM
3205 version) now fully supports unicode strings as arguments to various file
3206 system calls, eg. open(), file(), os.stat() and os.listdir().
3207
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003208- The current naming convention for Python on the Macintosh is that MacPython
3209 refers to the unix-based OSX-only version, and MacPython-OS9 refers to the
3210 CFM-based version that runs on both OS9 and OSX.
3211
3212- All MacPython-OS9 functionality is now available in an OSX unix build,
3213 including the Carbon modules, the IDE, OSA support, etc. A lot of this
3214 will only work correctly in a framework build, though, because you cannot
3215 talk to the window manager unless your application is run from a .app
3216 bundle. There is a command line tool "pythonw" that runs your script
3217 with an interpreter living in such a .app bundle, this interpreter should
3218 be used to run any Python script using the window manager (including
3219 Tkinter or wxPython scripts).
Tim Petersbbc5d162003-01-02 16:02:27 +00003220
Jack Jansen8bb80db2002-12-30 22:42:43 +00003221- Most of Mac/Lib has moved to Lib/plat-mac, which is again used both in
3222 MacPython-OSX and MacPython-OS9. The only modules remaining in Mac/Lib
3223 are specifically for MacPython-OS9 (CFM support, preference resources, etc).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003224
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003225- A new utility PythonLauncher will start a Python interpreter when a .py or
3226 .pyw script is double-clicked in the Finder. By default .py scripts are
3227 run with a normal Python interpreter in a Terminal window and .pyw
3228 files are run with a window-aware pythonw interpreter without a Terminal
3229 window, but all this can be customized.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003230
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003231- MacPython-OS9 is now Carbon-only, so it runs on Mac OS 9 or Mac OS X and
3232 possibly on Mac OS 8.6 with the right CarbonLib installed, but not on earlier
3233 releases.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003234
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003235- Many tools such as BuildApplet.py and gensuitemodule.py now support a command
3236 line interface too.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003237
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003238- All the Carbon classes are now PEP253 compliant, meaning that you can
3239 subclass them from Python. Most of the attributes have gone, you should
3240 now use the accessor function call API, which is also what Apple's
3241 documentation uses. Some attributes such as grafport.visRgn are still
3242 available for convenience.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003243
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003244- New Carbon modules File (implementing the APIs in Files.h and Aliases.h)
3245 and Folder (APIs from Folders.h). The old macfs builtin module is
3246 gone, and replaced by a Python wrapper around the new modules.
3247
3248- Pathname handling should now be fully consistent: MacPython-OSX always uses
3249 unix pathnames and MacPython-OS9 always uses colon-separated Mac pathnames
3250 (also when running on Mac OS X).
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003251
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003252- New Carbon modules Help and AH give access to the Carbon Help Manager.
3253 There are hooks in the IDE to allow accessing the Python documentation
3254 (and Apple's Carbon and Cocoa documentation) through the Help Viewer.
3255 See Mac/OSX/README for converting the Python documentation to a
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003256 Help Viewer compatible form and installing it.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003257
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003258- OSA support has been redesigned and the generated Python classes now
3259 mirror the inheritance defined by the underlying OSA classes.
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003260
Jack Jansenae3cb6c2002-12-23 11:25:49 +00003261- MacPython no longer maps both \r and \n to \n on input for any text file.
3262 This feature has been replaced by universal newline support (PEP278).
Tim Peters0bf60bd2003-01-08 20:40:01 +00003263
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003264- The default encoding for Python sourcefiles in MacPython-OS9 is no longer
Guido van Rossum16c85172003-02-20 01:52:48 +00003265 mac-roman (or whatever your local Mac encoding was) but "ascii", like on
Jack Jansen05d284b2003-01-08 16:29:17 +00003266 other platforms. If you really need sourcefiles with Mac characters in them
3267 you can change this in site.py.
Tim Petersaf8446f2001-12-21 21:36:50 +00003268
Guido van Rossum351a7dd2003-02-20 01:56:17 +00003269
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003270What's New in Python 2.2 final?
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003271===============================
3272
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003273*Release date: 21-Dec-2001*
3274
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003275Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003276--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003277
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003278- pickle.py, cPickle: allow pickling instances of new-style classes
3279 with a custom metaclass.
3280
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003281Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003282-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003283
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003284- weakref proxy object: when comparing, unwrap both arguments if both
3285 are proxies.
3286
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003287Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003288-----------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003289
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003290- binascii.b2a_base64(): fix a potential buffer overrun when encoding
3291 very short strings.
3292
3293- cPickle: the obscure "fast" mode was suspected of causing stack
3294 overflows on the Mac. Hopefully fixed this by setting the recursion
3295 limit much smaller. If the limit is too low (it only affects
3296 performance), you can change it by defining PY_CPICKLE_FAST_LIMIT
3297 when compiling cPickle.c (or in pyconfig.h).
3298
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003299Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003300-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003301
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003302- dumbdbm.py: fixed a dumb old bug (the file didn't get synched at
3303 close or delete time).
3304
3305- rfc822.py: fixed a bug where the address '<>' was converted to None
3306 instead of an empty string (also fixes the email.Utils module).
3307
3308- xmlrpclib.py: version 1.0.0; uses precision for doubles.
3309
3310- test suite: the pickle and cPickle tests were not executing any code
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003311 when run from the standard regression test.
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003312
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003313Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003314-----------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003315
3316Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003317-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003318
3319C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003320-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003321
3322New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003323-------------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003324
3325Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003326-----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003327
3328Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003329-------
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003330
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003331- distutils package: fixed broken Windows installers (bdist_wininst).
3332
3333- tempfile.py: prevent mysterious warnings when TemporaryFileWrapper
3334 instances are deleted at process exit time.
3335
3336- socket.py: prevent mysterious warnings when socket instances are
3337 deleted at process exit time.
3338
3339- posixmodule.c: fix a Windows crash with stat() of a filename ending
3340 in backslash.
3341
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003342Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003343----
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003344
Barry Warsaw52acb492001-12-21 20:04:22 +00003345- The Carbon toolbox modules have been upgraded to Universal Headers
3346 3.4, and experimental CoreGraphics and CarbonEvents modules have
3347 been added. All only for framework-enabled MacOSX.
3348
Tim Peters909c0912001-12-14 23:16:18 +00003349
Tim Peters6272dfd2001-12-13 19:34:00 +00003350What's New in Python 2.2c1?
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003351===========================
3352
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003353*Release date: 14-Dec-2001*
3354
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003355Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003356--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003357
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003358- Guido's tutorial introduction to the new type/class features has
3359 been extensively updated. See
3360
3361 http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html
3362
3363 That remains the primary documentation in this area.
3364
Guido van Rossum33bab012001-12-05 22:45:48 +00003365- Fixed a leak: instance variables declared with __slots__ were never
3366 deleted!
3367
Guido van Rossum4b800852001-12-03 00:54:52 +00003368- The "delete attribute" method of descriptor objects is called
3369 __delete__, not __del__. In previous releases, it was mistakenly
3370 called __del__, which created an unfortunate overloading condition
3371 with finalizers. (The "get attribute" and "set attribute" methods
3372 are still called __get__ and __set__, respectively.)
3373
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003374- Some subtle issues with the super built-in were fixed:
3375
3376 (a) When super itself is subclassed, its __get__ method would still
3377 return an instance of the base class (i.e., of super).
3378
3379 (b) super(C, C()).__class__ would return C rather than super. This
3380 is confusing. To fix this, I decided to change the semantics of
3381 super so that it only applies to code attributes, not to data
3382 attributes. After all, overriding data attributes is not
3383 supported anyway.
3384
3385 (c) The __get__ method didn't check whether the argument was an
3386 instance of the type used in creation of the super instance.
3387
Guido van Rossumcd7b7d62001-12-04 21:02:07 +00003388- Previously, hash() of an instance of a subclass of a mutable type
3389 (list or dictionary) would return some value, rather than raising
3390 TypeError. This has been fixed. Also, directly calling
3391 dict.__hash__ and list.__hash__ now raises the same TypeError
3392 (previously, these were the same as object.__hash__).
Guido van Rossumcdbbd0a2001-12-03 15:46:59 +00003393
Guido van Rossumd331cb52001-12-05 19:46:42 +00003394- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
3395 all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
3396 dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
3397
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003398Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003399-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003400
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003401- -Qnew now works as documented in PEP 238: when -Qnew is passed on
3402 the command line, all occurrences of "/" use true division instead
3403 of classic division. See the PEP for details. Note that "all"
3404 means all instances in library and 3rd-party modules, as well as in
3405 your own code. As the PEP says, -Qnew is intended for use only in
3406 educational environments with control over the libraries in use.
Tim Petersbf72fe22001-12-11 21:43:14 +00003407 Note that test_coercion.py in the standard Python test suite fails
3408 under -Qnew; this is expected, and won't be repaired until true
3409 division becomes the default (in the meantime, test_coercion is
3410 testing the current rules).
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00003411
Fred Drake6c01e252001-12-14 17:08:12 +00003412- complex() now only allows the first argument to be a string
3413 argument, and raises TypeError if either the second arg is a string
3414 or if the second arg is specified when the first is a string.
3415
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003416Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003417-----------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003418
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00003419- gc.get_referents was renamed to gc.get_referrers.
3420
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003421Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003422-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003423
Tim Peters25059d32001-12-07 20:35:43 +00003424- Functions in the os.spawn() family now release the global interpreter
3425 lock around calling the platform spawn. They should always have done
3426 this, but did not before 2.2c1. Multithreaded programs calling
3427 an os.spawn function with P_WAIT will no longer block all Python threads
3428 until the spawned program completes. It's possible that some programs
3429 relies on blocking, although more likely by accident than by design.
3430
Martin v. Löwis3a89b2b2001-11-25 14:35:58 +00003431- webbrowser defaults to netscape.exe on OS/2 now.
3432
Martin v. Löwis652e1912001-11-25 14:50:56 +00003433- Tix.ResizeHandle exposes detach_widget, hide, and show.
3434
Martin v. Löwis714d2e22001-12-02 12:26:03 +00003435- The charset alias windows_1252 has been added.
3436
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003437- types.StringTypes is a tuple containing the defined string types;
3438 usually this will be (str, unicode), but if Python was compiled
3439 without Unicode support it will be just (str,).
3440
3441- The pulldom and minidom modules were synchronized to PyXML.
3442
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003443Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003444-----------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003445
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003446- A new script called Tools/scripts/google.py was added, which fires
3447 off a search on Google.
3448
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003449Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003450-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003451
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003452- Note that release builds of Python should arrange to define the
3453 preprocessor symbol NDEBUG on the command line (or equivalent).
3454 In the 2.2 pre-release series we tried to define this by magic in
3455 Python.h instead, but it proved to cause problems for extension
3456 authors. The Unix, Windows and Mac builds now all define NDEBUG in
3457 release builds via cmdline (or equivalent) instead. Ports to
3458 other platforms should do likewise.
3459
Jack Jansen1999ef42001-12-06 21:47:20 +00003460- It is no longer necessary to use --with-suffix when building on a
3461 case-insensitive file system (such as Mac OS X HFS+). In the build
3462 directory an extension is used, but not in the installed python.
3463
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003464C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003465-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003466
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003467- New function PyDict_MergeFromSeq2() exposes the builtin dict
3468 constructor's logic for updating a dictionary from an iterable object
3469 producing key-value pairs.
3470
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003471- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() requires that the number of entries in
Tim Petersf582b822001-12-11 18:51:08 +00003472 the keyword list equal the number of argument specifiers. This
Tim Peterscffed4b2001-11-29 03:26:37 +00003473 wasn't checked correctly, and PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords could even
3474 dump core in some bad cases. This has been repaired. As a result,
3475 PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords may raise RuntimeError in bad cases that
3476 previously went unchallenged.
3477
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003478New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003479-------------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003480
3481Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003482-----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003483
3484Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003485-------
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003486
3487Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003488----
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003489
Jack Jansenffa260f2001-12-06 21:14:00 +00003490- In unix-Python on Mac OS X (and darwin) sys.platform is now "darwin",
3491 without any trailing digits.
Tim Petersb3c9af12001-11-17 00:21:57 +00003492
Barry Warsaw06557452001-12-14 20:47:12 +00003493- Changed logic for finding python home in Mac OS X framework Pythons.
3494 Now sys.executable points to the executable again, in stead of to
3495 the shared library. The latter is used only for locating the python
3496 home.
3497
3498
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003499What's New in Python 2.2b2?
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003500===========================
3501
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003502*Release date: 16-Nov-2001*
3503
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003504Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003505--------------------------------------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003506
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003507- Multiple inheritance mixing new-style and classic classes in the
3508 list of base classes is now allowed, so this works now:
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003509
3510 class Classic: pass
Guido van Rossum3d27df02001-11-15 20:27:54 +00003511 class Mixed(Classic, object): pass
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003512
3513 The MRO (method resolution order) for each base class is respected
3514 according to its kind, but the MRO for the derived class is computed
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003515 using new-style MRO rules if any base class is a new-style class.
Tim Peters76f7fe32001-11-15 20:02:21 +00003516 This needs to be documented.
3517
Tim Petersa427a2b2001-10-29 22:25:45 +00003518- The new builtin dictionary() constructor, and dictionary type, have
3519 been renamed to dict. This reflects a decade of common usage.
3520
Guido van Rossum3fc08d22001-11-15 20:33:10 +00003521- dict() now accepts an iterable object producing 2-sequences. For
3522 example, dict(d.items()) == d for any dictionary d. The argument,
3523 and the elements of the argument, can be any iterable objects.
3524
Guido van Rossum7ad2d1e2001-10-29 22:11:00 +00003525- New-style classes can now have a __del__ method, which is called
3526 when the instance is deleted (just like for classic classes).
3527
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003528- Assignment to object.__dict__ is now possible, for objects that are
3529 instances of new-style classes that have a __dict__ (unless the base
3530 class forbids it).
3531
Guido van Rossumc8e56452001-10-22 00:43:43 +00003532- Methods of built-in types now properly check for keyword arguments
3533 (formerly these were silently ignored). The only built-in methods
3534 that take keyword arguments are __call__, __init__ and __new__.
3535
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003536- The socket function has been converted to a type; see below.
3537
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003538Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003539-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003540
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003541- Assignment to __debug__ raises SyntaxError at compile-time. This
3542 was promised when 2.1c1 was released as "What's New in Python 2.1c1"
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003543 (see below) says.
Jeremy Hylton249aaed2001-11-09 21:06:24 +00003544
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003545- Clarified the error messages for unsupported operands to an operator
3546 (like 1 + '').
3547
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003548Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003549-----------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003550
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003551- mmap has a new keyword argument, "access", allowing a uniform way for
3552 both Windows and Unix users to create read-only, write-through and
3553 copy-on-write memory mappings. This was previously possible only on
3554 Unix. A new keyword argument was required to support this in a
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003555 uniform way because the mmap() signatures had diverged across
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003556 platforms. Thanks to Jay T Miller for repairing this!
3557
Tim Peters169ded02001-11-03 19:57:21 +00003558- By default, the gc.garbage list now contains only those instances in
3559 unreachable cycles that have __del__ methods; in 2.1 it contained all
3560 instances in unreachable cycles. "Instances" here has been generalized
3561 to include instances of both new-style and old-style classes.
3562
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003563- The socket module defines a new method for socket objects,
3564 sendall(). This is like send() but may make multiple calls to
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003565 send() until all data has been sent. Also, the socket function has
3566 been converted to a subclassable type, like list and tuple (etc.)
3567 before it; socket and SocketType are now the same thing.
Guido van Rossum12d955c2001-10-26 14:56:06 +00003568
3569- Various bugfixes to the curses module. There is now a test suite
3570 for the curses module (you have to run it manually).
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003571
Guido van Rossum692adf12001-10-30 03:03:03 +00003572- binascii.b2a_base64 no longer places an arbitrary restriction of 57
3573 bytes on its input.
3574
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003575Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003576-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003577
Tim Peters5ebfd362001-11-13 23:11:19 +00003578- tkFileDialog exposes a Directory class and askdirectory
Martin v. Löwis25ee87c2001-11-07 22:38:08 +00003579 convenience function.
3580
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003581- Symbolic group names in regular expressions must be unique. For
3582 example, the regexp r'(?P<abc>)(?P<abc>)' is not allowed, because a
3583 single name can't mean both "group 1" and "group 2" simultaneously.
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003584 Python 2.2 detects this error at regexp compilation time;
3585 previously, the error went undetected, and results were
3586 unpredictable. Also in sre, the pattern.split(), pattern.sub(), and
3587 pattern.subn() methods have been rewritten in C. Also, an
3588 experimental function/method finditer() has been added, which works
3589 like findall() but returns an iterator.
Tim Peters75335872001-11-03 19:35:43 +00003590
Martin v. Löwisb7b32602001-11-02 23:48:20 +00003591- Tix exposes more commands through the classes DirSelectBox,
3592 DirSelectDialog, ListNoteBook, Meter, CheckList, and the
3593 methods tix_addbitmapdir, tix_cget, tix_configure, tix_filedialog,
3594 tix_getbitmap, tix_getimage, tix_option_get, and tix_resetoptions.
3595
Tim Peters98791af2001-10-23 01:59:54 +00003596- Traceback objects are now scanned by cyclic garbage collection, so
3597 cycles created by casual use of sys.exc_info() no longer cause
3598 permanent memory leaks (provided garbage collection is enabled).
3599
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003600- os.extsep -- a new variable needed by the RISCOS support. It is the
3601 separator used by extensions, and is '.' on all platforms except
3602 RISCOS, where it is '/'. There is no need to use this variable
3603 unless you have a masochistic desire to port your code to RISCOS.
3604
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003605- mimetypes.py has optional support for non-standard, but commonly
3606 found types. guess_type() and guess_extension() now accept an
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003607 optional 'strict' flag, defaulting to true, which controls whether
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003608 recognize non-standard types or not. A few non-standard types we
3609 know about have been added. Also, when run as a script, there are
3610 new -l and -e options.
3611
3612- statcache is now deprecated.
3613
3614- email.Utils.formatdate() now produces the preferred RFC 2822 style
3615 dates with numeric timezones (it used to produce obsolete dates
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003616 hard coded to "GMT" timezone). An optional 'localtime' flag is
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003617 added to produce dates in the local timezone, with daylight savings
3618 time properly taken into account.
3619
3620- In pickle and cPickle, instead of masking errors in load() by
3621 transforming them into SystemError, we let the original exception
3622 propagate out. Also, implement support for __safe_for_unpickling__
3623 in pickle, as it already was supported in cPickle.
3624
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003625Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003626-----------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003627
3628Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003629-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003630
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003631- The dbm module is built using libdb1 if available. The bsddb module
3632 is built with libdb3 if available.
3633
3634- Misc/Makefile.pre.in has been removed by BDFL pronouncement.
3635
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003636C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003637-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003638
Tim Peters1fc240e2001-10-26 05:06:50 +00003639- New function PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE() returns the size of a non-
3640 NULL result from PySequence_Fast(), more quickly than calling
3641 PySequence_Size().
3642
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003643- New argument unpacking function PyArg_UnpackTuple() added.
3644
3645- New functions PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs() and
3646 PyObject_CallMethodObjArgs() have been added to make it more
3647 convenient and efficient to call functions and methods from C.
3648
3649- PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords() no longer masks errors, so it's
3650 possible that this will propagate errors it didn't before.
3651
3652- New function PyObject_CheckReadBuffer(), which returns true if its
3653 argument supports the single-segment readable buffer interface.
3654
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003655New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003656-------------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003657
Guido van Rossum86443212001-10-27 22:28:54 +00003658- We've finally confirmed that this release builds on HP-UX 11.00,
3659 *with* threads, and passes the test suite.
3660
Tim Peters7a33d8b2001-11-05 02:51:07 +00003661- Thanks to a series of patches from Michael Muller, Python may build
3662 again under OS/2 Visual Age C++.
3663
Guido van Rossum49192142001-10-24 20:51:44 +00003664- Updated RISCOS port by Dietmar Schwertberger.
3665
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003666Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003667-----
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003668
Andrew M. Kuchling15e03532001-10-22 16:37:10 +00003669- Added a test script for the curses module. It isn't run automatically;
3670 regrtest.py must be run with '-u curses' to enable it.
3671
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003672Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003673-------
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003674
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003675Mac
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003676----
Barry Warsaw012852b2001-11-16 16:17:27 +00003677
3678- PythonScript has been moved to unsupported and is slated to be
3679 removed completely in the next release.
3680
3681- It should now be possible to build applets that work on both OS9 and
3682 OSX.
3683
3684- The core is now linked with CoreServices not Carbon; as a side
3685 result, default 8bit encoding on OSX is now ASCII.
3686
3687- Python should now build on OSX 10.1.1
3688
Tim Peters84362bc2001-10-19 17:55:30 +00003689
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003690What's New in Python 2.2b1?
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003691===========================
3692
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003693*Release date: 19-Oct-2001*
3694
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003695Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003696--------------------------------------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003697
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003698- New-style classes are now always dynamic (except for built-in and
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003699 extension types). There is no longer a performance penalty, and I
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003700 no longer see another reason to keep this baggage around. One relic
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003701 remains: the __dict__ of a new-style class is a read-only proxy; you
3702 must set the class's attribute to modify it. As a consequence, the
Guido van Rossum687ae002001-10-15 22:03:32 +00003703 __defined__ attribute of new-style types no longer exists, for lack
3704 of need: there is once again only one __dict__ (although in the
Guido van Rossum3eea25c2001-10-16 00:46:57 +00003705 future a __cache__ may be resurrected with a similar function, if I
3706 can prove that it actually speeds things up).
Guido van Rossum50fda3b2001-10-04 19:46:06 +00003707
Tim Peters1c9ca872001-10-04 06:43:12 +00003708- C.__doc__ now works as expected for new-style classes (in 2.2a4 it
3709 always returned None, even when there was a class docstring).
3710
3711- doctest now finds and runs docstrings attached to new-style classes,
3712 class methods, static methods, and properties.
3713
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003714Core and builtins
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003715-----------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003716
Guido van Rossuma8bcf802001-10-15 15:53:58 +00003717- A very subtle syntactical pitfall in list comprehensions was fixed.
3718 For example: [a+b for a in 'abc', for b in 'def']. The comma in
3719 this example is a mistake. Previously, this would silently let 'a'
3720 iterate over the singleton tuple ('abc',), yielding ['abcd', 'abce',
3721 'abcf'] rather than the intended ['ad', 'ae', 'af', 'bd', 'be',
3722 'bf', 'cd', 'ce', 'cf']. Now, this is flagged as a syntax error.
3723 Note that [a for a in <singleton>] is a convoluted way to say
3724 [<singleton>] anyway, so it's not like any expressiveness is lost.
3725
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003726- getattr(obj, name, default) now only catches AttributeError, as
3727 documented, rather than returning the default value for all
3728 exceptions (which could mask bugs in a __getattr__ hook, for
3729 example).
3730
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003731- Weak reference objects are now part of the core and offer a C API.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003732 A bug which could allow a core dump when binary operations involved
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003733 proxy reference has been fixed. weakref.ReferenceError is now a
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003734 built-in exception.
Fred Drake934d2a42001-10-18 18:18:06 +00003735
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003736- unicode(obj) now behaves more like str(obj), accepting arbitrary
3737 objects, and calling a __unicode__ method if it exists.
3738 unicode(obj, encoding) and unicode(obj, encoding, errors) still
Marc-André Lemburgb5507ec2001-10-19 12:02:29 +00003739 require an 8-bit string or character buffer argument.
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003740
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003741- isinstance() now allows any object as the first argument and a
3742 class, a type or something with a __bases__ tuple attribute for the
3743 second argument. The second argument may also be a tuple of a
3744 class, type, or something with __bases__, in which case isinstance()
3745 will return true if the first argument is an instance of any of the
3746 things contained in the second argument tuple. E.g.
3747
3748 isinstance(x, (A, B))
3749
3750 returns true if x is an instance of A or B.
3751
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003752Extension modules
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003753-----------------
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003754
3755- thread.start_new_thread() now returns the thread ID (previously None).
3756
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003757- binascii has now two quopri support functions, a2b_qp and b2a_qp.
3758
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003759- readline now supports setting the startup_hook and the
3760 pre_event_hook, and adds the add_history() function.
Martin v. Löwis0daad592001-09-30 21:09:59 +00003761
Guido van Rossumc524d952001-10-19 01:31:59 +00003762- os and posix supports chroot(), setgroups() and unsetenv() where
3763 available. The stat(), fstat(), statvfs() and fstatvfs() functions
3764 now return "pseudo-sequences" -- the various fields can now be
3765 accessed as attributes (e.g. os.stat("/").st_mtime) but for
3766 backwards compatibility they also behave as a fixed-length sequence.
3767 Some platform-specific fields (e.g. st_rdev) are only accessible as
Guido van Rossum98bf58f2001-10-18 20:34:25 +00003768 attributes.
3769
3770- time: localtime(), gmtime() and strptime() now return a
3771 pseudo-sequence similar to the os.stat() return value, with
3772 attributes like tm_year etc.
Martin v. Löwis16628c92001-10-04 22:46:41 +00003773
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003774- Decompression objects in the zlib module now accept an optional
3775 second parameter to decompress() that specifies the maximum amount
3776 of memory to use for the uncompressed data.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003777
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003778- optional SSL support in the socket module now exports OpenSSL
3779 functions RAND_add(), RAND_egd(), and RAND_status(). These calls
3780 are useful on platforms like Solaris where OpenSSL does not
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003781 automatically seed its PRNG. Also, the keyfile and certfile
3782 arguments to socket.ssl() are now optional.
3783
3784- posixmodule (and by extension, the os module on POSIX platforms) now
3785 exports O_LARGEFILE, O_DIRECT, O_DIRECTORY, and O_NOFOLLOW.
Jeremy Hyltoncb441432001-10-19 03:40:19 +00003786
Guido van Rossum9074ef62001-10-16 21:34:49 +00003787Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003788-------
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003789
Tim Peters7402f792001-10-02 03:53:41 +00003790- doctest now excludes functions and classes not defined by the module
3791 being tested, thanks to Tim Hochberg.
3792
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003793- HotShot, a new profiler implemented using a C-based callback, has
3794 been added. This substantially reduces the overhead of profiling,
3795 but it is still quite preliminary. Support modules and
3796 documentation will be added in upcoming releases (before 2.2 final).
3797
Guido van Rossumc4b09b42001-10-04 10:19:00 +00003798- profile now produces correct output in situations where an exception
3799 raised in Python is cleared by C code (e.g. hasattr()). This used
3800 to cause wrong output, including spurious claims of recursive
3801 functions and attribution of time spent to the wrong function.
3802
Tim Peters0a1fc4e2001-10-07 03:12:08 +00003803 The code and documentation for the derived OldProfile and HotProfile
3804 profiling classes was removed. The code hasn't worked for years (if
3805 you tried to use them, they raised exceptions). OldProfile
3806 intended to reproduce the behavior of the profiler Python used more
3807 than 7 years ago, and isn't interesting anymore. HotProfile intended
3808 to provide a faster profiler (but producing less information), and
3809 that's a worthy goal we intend to meet via a different approach (but
3810 without losing information).
3811
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003812- Profile.calibrate() has a new implementation that should deliver
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003813 a much better system-specific calibration constant. The constant can
3814 now be specified in an instance constructor, or as a Profile class or
3815 instance variable, instead of by editing profile.py's source code.
3816 Calibration must still be done manually (see the docs for the profile
3817 module).
3818
Raymond Hettingerd65ec372003-03-11 21:43:55 +00003819 Note that Profile.calibrate() must be overridden by subclasses.
Tim Peters659a6032001-10-09 20:51:19 +00003820 Improving the accuracy required exploiting detailed knowledge of
3821 profiler internals; the earlier method abstracted away the details
3822 and measured a simplified model instead, but consequently computed
3823 a constant too small by a factor of 2 on some modern machines.
Tim Peterscce092d2001-10-09 05:31:56 +00003824
Martin v. Löwis16dc7f42001-09-30 20:32:11 +00003825- quopri's encode and decode methods take an optional header parameter,
Jeremy Hylton6f543b62001-10-16 20:42:52 +00003826 which indicates whether output is intended for the header 'Q'
3827 encoding.
3828
Guido van Rossuma5343cc2001-10-18 18:02:07 +00003829- The SocketServer.ThreadingMixIn class now closes the request after
3830 finish_request() returns. (Not when it errors out though.)
3831
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003832- The nntplib module's NNTP.body() method has grown a 'file' argument
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003833 to allow saving the message body to a file.
3834
3835- The email package has added a class email.Parser.HeaderParser which
3836 only parses headers and does not recurse into the message's body.
3837 Also, the module/class MIMEAudio has been added for representing
3838 audio data (contributed by Anthony Baxter).
3839
3840- ftplib should be able to handle files > 2GB.
3841
3842- ConfigParser.getboolean() now also interprets TRUE, FALSE, YES, NO,
3843 ON, and OFF.
3844
Fred Drakecb7a6b52001-10-22 18:41:51 +00003845- xml.dom.minidom NodeList objects now support the length attribute
3846 and item() method as required by the DOM specifications.
3847
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003848Tools/Demos
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003849-----------
Guido van Rossumed554f62001-10-02 23:15:37 +00003850
3851- Demo/dns was removed. It no longer serves any purpose; a package
3852 derived from it is now maintained by Anthony Baxter, see
3853 http://PyDNS.SourceForge.net.
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003854
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003855- The freeze tool has been made more robust, and two new options have
3856 been added: -X and -E.
3857
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003858Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003859-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003860
Barry Warsawf6fb1712001-10-19 05:35:40 +00003861- configure will use CXX in LINKCC if CXX is used to build main() and
3862 the system requires to link a C++ main using the C++ compiler.
3863
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003864C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003865-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003866
Guido van Rossum6c4bce32001-10-18 19:20:25 +00003867- The documentation for the tp_compare slot is updated to require that
3868 the return value must be -1, 0, 1; an arbitrary number <0 or >0 is
3869 not correct. This is not yet enforced but will be enforced in
3870 Python 2.3; even later, we may use -2 to indicate errors and +2 for
3871 "NotImplemented". Right now, -1 should be used for an error return.
3872
Tim Petersd38b1c72001-09-30 05:09:37 +00003873- PyLong_AsLongLong() now accepts int (as well as long) arguments.
3874 Consequently, PyArg_ParseTuple's 'L' code also accepts int (as well
3875 as long) arguments.
3876
Guido van Rossum3c288632001-10-16 21:13:49 +00003877- PyThread_start_new_thread() now returns a long int giving the thread
3878 ID, if one can be calculated; it returns -1 for error, 0 if no
3879 thread ID is calculated (this is an incompatible change, but only
3880 the thread module used this API). This code has only really been
3881 tested on Linux and Windows; other platforms please beware (and
3882 report any bugs or strange behavior).
3883
Guido van Rossum1c486092001-10-19 02:05:35 +00003884- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() no longer accepts Unicode objects as
3885 input.
3886
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003887New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003888-------------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003889
3890Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003891-----
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003892
3893Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003894-------
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003895
Tim Peters04cf1d32001-10-09 22:39:40 +00003896- Installer: If you install IDLE, and don't disable file-extension
3897 registration, a new "Edit with IDLE" context (right-click) menu entry
3898 is created for .py and .pyw files.
3899
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003900- The signal module now supports SIGBREAK on Windows, thanks to Steven
3901 Scott. Note that SIGBREAK is unique to Windows. The default SIGBREAK
3902 action remains to call Win32 ExitProcess(). This can be changed via
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00003903 signal.signal(). For example::
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003904
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003905 # Make Ctrl+Break raise KeyboardInterrupt, like Python's default Ctrl+C
3906 # (SIGINT) behavior.
3907 import signal
3908 signal.signal(signal.SIGBREAK, signal.default_int_handler)
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003909
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003910 try:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003911 while 1:
3912 pass
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003913 except KeyboardInterrupt:
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00003914 # We get here on Ctrl+C or Ctrl+Break now; if we had not changed
3915 # SIGBREAK, only on Ctrl+C (and Ctrl+Break would terminate the
3916 # program without the possibility for any Python-level cleanup).
3917 print "Clean exit"
Tim Peters1ce3cf72001-10-01 17:58:40 +00003918
Tim Petersabf925f2001-09-28 21:53:42 +00003919
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003920What's New in Python 2.2a4?
3921===========================
3922
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003923*Release date: 28-Sep-2001*
3924
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003925Type/class unification and new-style classes
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003926--------------------------------------------
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003927
3928- pydoc and inspect are now aware of new-style classes;
3929 e.g. help(list) at the interactive prompt now shows proper
3930 documentation for all operations on list objects.
3931
3932- Applications using Jim Fulton's ExtensionClass module can now safely
3933 be used with Python 2.2. In particular, Zope 2.4.1 now works with
3934 Python 2.2 (as well as with Python 2.1.1). The Demo/metaclass
3935 examples also work again. It is hoped that Gtk and Boost also work
3936 with 2.2a4 and beyond. (If you can confirm this, please write
3937 webmaster@python.org; if there are still problems, please open a bug
3938 report on SourceForge.)
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00003939
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003940- property() now takes 4 keyword arguments: fget, fset, fdel and doc.
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003941 These map to read-only attributes 'fget', 'fset', 'fdel', and '__doc__'
Tim Peters66c1a522001-09-24 21:17:50 +00003942 in the constructed property object. fget, fset and fdel weren't
3943 discoverable from Python in 2.2a3. __doc__ is new, and allows to
3944 associate a docstring with a property.
3945
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003946- Comparison overloading is now more completely implemented. For
3947 example, a str subclass instance can properly be compared to a str
3948 instance, and it can properly overload comparison. Ditto for most
3949 other built-in object types.
3950
3951- The repr() of new-style classes has changed; instead of <type
3952 'M.Foo'> a new-style class is now rendered as <class 'M.Foo'>,
3953 *except* for built-in types, which are still rendered as <type
3954 'Foo'> (to avoid upsetting existing code that might parse or
3955 otherwise rely on repr() of certain type objects).
3956
3957- The repr() of new-style objects is now always <Foo object at XXX>;
3958 previously, it was sometimes <Foo instance at XXX>.
3959
3960- For new-style classes, what was previously called __getattr__ is now
3961 called __getattribute__. This method, if defined, is called for
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00003962 *every* attribute access. A new __getattr__ hook more similar to the
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003963 one in classic classes is defined which is called only if regular
3964 attribute access raises AttributeError; to catch *all* attribute
3965 access, you can use __getattribute__ (for new-style classes). If
3966 both are defined, __getattribute__ is called first, and if it raises
3967 AttributeError, __getattr__ is called.
3968
3969- The __class__ attribute of new-style objects can be assigned to.
3970 The new class must have the same C-level object layout as the old
3971 class.
3972
3973- The builtin file type can be subclassed now. In the usual pattern,
3974 "file" is the name of the builtin type, and file() is a new builtin
3975 constructor, with the same signature as the builtin open() function.
3976 file() is now the preferred way to open a file.
3977
3978- Previously, __new__ would only see sequential arguments passed to
3979 the type in a constructor call; __init__ would see both sequential
3980 and keyword arguments. This made no sense whatsoever any more, so
3981 now both __new__ and __init__ see all arguments.
3982
3983- Previously, hash() applied to an instance of a subclass of str or
3984 unicode always returned 0. This has been repaired.
3985
3986- Previously, an operation on an instance of a subclass of an
3987 immutable type (int, long, float, complex, tuple, str, unicode),
3988 where the subtype didn't override the operation (and so the
3989 operation was handled by the builtin type), could return that
3990 instance instead a value of the base type. For example, if s was of
Andrew M. Kuchling21b23b02002-05-07 20:58:03 +00003991 a str subclass type, s[:] returned s as-is. Now it returns a str
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003992 with the same value as s.
3993
Barry Warsaw86fbaf82001-09-28 15:26:12 +00003994- Provisional support for pickling new-style objects has been added.
3995
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003996Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00003997----
Guido van Rossum808eea72001-09-25 04:15:41 +00003998
Tim Peters2c9aa5e2001-09-23 04:06:05 +00003999- file.writelines() now accepts any iterable object producing strings.
4000
Marc-André Lemburgaefd7662001-09-20 12:59:37 +00004001- PyUnicode_FromEncodedObject() now works very much like
4002 PyObject_Str(obj) in that it tries to use __str__/tp_str
4003 on the object if the object is not a string or buffer. This
4004 makes unicode() behave like str() when applied to non-string/buffer
4005 objects.
4006
Andrew M. Kuchling51c18162001-10-22 01:47:26 +00004007- PyFile_WriteObject now passes Unicode objects to the file's write
4008 method. As a result, all file-like objects which may be the target
Martin v. Löwis2777c022001-09-19 13:47:32 +00004009 of a print statement must support Unicode objects, i.e. they must
4010 at least convert them into ASCII strings.
4011
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004012- Thread scheduling on Solaris should be improved; it is no longer
4013 necessary to insert a small sleep at the start of a thread in order
4014 to let other runnable threads be scheduled.
4015
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004016Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004017-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004018
Marc-André Lemburgbf990172001-09-27 14:17:33 +00004019- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4020 read character buffer compatible objects for their .write() methods.
4021 These objects are converted to strings and then handled as such
4022 by the instances.
4023
Barry Warsaw2f600732001-09-24 04:28:10 +00004024- The "email" package has been added. This is basically a port of the
4025 mimelib package <http://sf.net/projects/mimelib> with API changes
4026 and some implementations updated to use iterators and generators.
4027
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004028- difflib.ndiff() and difflib.Differ.compare() are generators now. This
4029 restores the ability of Tools/scripts/ndiff.py to start producing output
4030 before the entire comparison is complete.
4031
Barry Warsaw58b072d2001-09-22 04:44:21 +00004032- StringIO.StringIO instances and cStringIO.StringIO instances support
4033 iteration just like file objects (i.e. their .readline() method is
4034 called for each iteration until it returns an empty string).
4035
Marc-André Lemburg494f2ae2001-09-19 11:33:31 +00004036- The codecs module has grown four new helper APIs to access
4037 builtin codecs: getencoder(), getdecoder(), getreader(),
4038 getwriter().
4039
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004040- SimpleXMLRPCServer: a new module (based upon SimpleHTMLServer)
4041 simplifies writing XML RPC servers.
4042
Barry Warsaw647d5e82001-09-28 17:01:02 +00004043- os.path.realpath(): a new function that returns the absolute pathname
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004044 after interpretation of symbolic links. On non-Unix systems, this
4045 is an alias for os.path.abspath().
4046
Tim Peters16a77ad2001-09-08 04:00:12 +00004047- operator.indexOf() (PySequence_Index() in the C API) now works with any
4048 iterable object.
4049
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004050- smtplib now supports various authentication and security features of
4051 the SMTP protocol through the new login() and starttls() methods.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004052
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004053- hmac: a new module implementing keyed hashing for message
4054 authentication.
4055
4056- mimetypes now recognizes more extensions and file types. At the
4057 same time, some mappings not sanctioned by IANA were removed.
Guido van Rossumd8185ca2001-09-14 16:35:16 +00004058
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004059- The "compiler" package has been brought up to date to the state of
Guido van Rossumc9ed5dc2001-09-20 05:30:24 +00004060 Python 2.2 bytecode generation. It has also been promoted from a
4061 Tool to a standard library package. (Tools/compiler still exists as
4062 a sample driver.)
4063
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004064Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004065-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004066
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004067- Large file support (LFS) is now automatic when the platform supports
4068 it; no more manual configuration tweaks are needed. On Linux, at
4069 least, it's possible to have a system whose C library supports large
4070 files but whose kernel doesn't; in this case, large file support is
4071 still enabled but doesn't do you any good unless you upgrade your
4072 kernel or share your Python executable with another system whose
4073 kernel has large file support.
4074
4075- The configure script now supplies plausible defaults in a
4076 cross-compilation environment. This doesn't mean that the supplied
4077 values are always correct, or that cross-compilation now works
4078 flawlessly -- but it's a first step (and it shuts up most of
4079 autoconf's warnings about AC_TRY_RUN).
4080
4081- The Unix build is now a bit less chatty, courtesy of the parser
4082 generator. The build is completely silent (except for errors) when
4083 using "make -s", thanks to a -q option to setup.py.
4084
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004085C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004086-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004087
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004088- The "structmember" API now supports some new flag bits to deny read
4089 and/or write access to attributes in restricted execution mode.
4090
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004091New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004092-------------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004093
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004094- Compaq's iPAQ handheld, running the "familiar" Linux distribution
4095 (http://familiar.handhelds.org).
4096
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004097Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004098-----
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004099
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004100- The "classic" standard tests, which work by comparing stdout to
4101 an expected-output file under Lib/test/output/, no longer stop at
4102 the first mismatch. Instead the test is run to completion, and a
4103 variant of ndiff-style comparison is used to report all differences.
4104 This is much easier to understand than the previous style of reporting.
4105
4106- The unittest-based standard tests now use regrtest's test_main()
4107 convention, instead of running as a side-effect of merely being
4108 imported. This allows these tests to be run in more natural and
4109 flexible ways as unittests, outside the regrtest framework.
4110
4111- regrtest.py is much better integrated with unittest and doctest now,
4112 especially in regard to reporting errors.
4113
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004114Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004115-------
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004116
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004117- Large file support now also works for files > 4GB, on filesystems
Tim Peters8a9c2842001-09-22 21:30:22 +00004118 that support it (NTFS under Windows 2000). See "What's New in
4119 Python 2.2a3" for more detail.
Guido van Rossum624c8af2001-09-18 15:21:04 +00004120
Tim Petersb07352e2001-09-08 01:25:47 +00004121
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004122What's New in Python 2.2a3?
4123===========================
4124
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004125*Release Date: 07-Sep-2001*
4126
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004127Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004128----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004129
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004130- Conversion of long to float now raises OverflowError if the long is too
4131 big to represent as a C double.
4132
Tim Peters32f453e2001-09-03 08:35:41 +00004133- The 3-argument builtin pow() no longer allows a third non-None argument
4134 if either of the first two arguments is a float, or if both are of
4135 integer types and the second argument is negative (in which latter case
4136 the arguments are converted to float, so this is really the same
4137 restriction).
4138
Tim Peters5d2b77c2001-09-03 05:47:38 +00004139- The builtin dir() now returns more information, and sometimes much
4140 more, generally naming all attributes of an object, and all attributes
4141 reachable from the object via its class, and from its class's base
4142 classes, and so on from them too. Example: in 2.2a2, dir([]) returned
4143 an empty list. In 2.2a3,
4144
4145 >>> dir([])
4146 ['__add__', '__class__', '__contains__', '__delattr__', '__delitem__',
4147 '__eq__', '__ge__', '__getattr__', '__getitem__', '__getslice__',
4148 '__gt__', '__hash__', '__iadd__', '__imul__', '__init__', '__le__',
4149 '__len__', '__lt__', '__mul__', '__ne__', '__new__', '__repr__',
4150 '__rmul__', '__setattr__', '__setitem__', '__setslice__', '__str__',
4151 'append', 'count', 'extend', 'index', 'insert', 'pop', 'remove',
4152 'reverse', 'sort']
4153
4154 dir(module) continues to return only the module's attributes, though.
4155
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004156- Overflowing operations on plain ints now return a long int rather
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004157 than raising OverflowError. This is a partial implementation of PEP
4158 237. You can use -Wdefault::OverflowWarning to enable a warning for
4159 this situation, and -Werror::OverflowWarning to revert to the old
4160 OverflowError exception.
4161
Guido van Rossum61c345f2001-09-04 03:26:15 +00004162- A new command line option, -Q<arg>, is added to control run-time
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004163 warnings for the use of classic division. (See PEP 238.) Possible
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004164 values are -Qold, -Qwarn, -Qwarnall, and -Qnew. The default is
4165 -Qold, meaning the / operator has its classic meaning and no
4166 warnings are issued. Using -Qwarn issues a run-time warning about
4167 all uses of classic division for int and long arguments; -Qwarnall
4168 also warns about classic division for float and complex arguments
Tim Peters3caca232001-12-06 06:23:26 +00004169 (for use with fixdiv.py).
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004170 [Note: the remainder of this item (preserved below) became
4171 obsolete in 2.2c1 -- -Qnew has global effect in 2.2] ::
4172
4173 Using -Qnew is questionable; it turns on new division by default, but
4174 only in the __main__ module. You can usefully combine -Qwarn or
4175 -Qwarnall and -Qnew: this gives the __main__ module new division, and
4176 warns about classic division everywhere else.
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004177
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004178- Many built-in types can now be subclassed. This applies to int,
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004179 long, float, str, unicode, and tuple. (The types complex, list and
4180 dictionary can also be subclassed; this was introduced earlier.)
4181 Note that restrictions apply when subclassing immutable built-in
4182 types: you can only affect the value of the instance by overloading
4183 __new__. You can add mutable attributes, and the subclass instances
4184 will have a __dict__ attribute, but you cannot change the "value"
4185 (as implemented by the base class) of an immutable subclass instance
4186 once it is created.
4187
Guido van Rossumaaf80c82001-09-02 13:44:35 +00004188- The dictionary constructor now takes an optional argument, a
4189 mapping-like object, and initializes the dictionary from its
4190 (key, value) pairs.
4191
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004192- A new built-in type, super, has been added. This facilitates making
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004193 "cooperative super calls" in a multiple inheritance setting. For an
4194 explanation, see http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#cooperation
4195
Guido van Rossum8d7234d2001-09-06 22:02:58 +00004196- A new built-in type, property, has been added. This enables the
4197 creation of "properties". These are attributes implemented by
4198 getter and setter functions (or only one of these for read-only or
4199 write-only attributes), without the need to override __getattr__.
4200 See http://www.python.org/2.2/descrintro.html#property
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004201
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004202- The syntax of floating-point and imaginary literals has been
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004203 liberalized, to allow leading zeroes. Examples of literals now
4204 legal that were SyntaxErrors before:
4205
4206 00.0 0e3 0100j 07.5 00000000000000000008.
4207
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004208- An old tokenizer bug allowed floating point literals with an incomplete
Tim Petersc6d95812001-08-28 20:56:27 +00004209 exponent, such as 1e and 3.1e-. Such literals now raise SyntaxError.
4210
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004211Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004212-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004213
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004214- telnetlib includes symbolic names for the options, and support for
Martin v. Löwis1da9c572002-11-04 09:56:00 +00004215 setting an option negotiation callback. It also supports processing
4216 of suboptions.
Martin v. Löwiscb227c92001-09-06 08:54:16 +00004217
Tim Petersa40c7932001-09-05 22:36:56 +00004218- The new C standard no longer requires that math libraries set errno to
4219 ERANGE on overflow. For platform libraries that exploit this new
4220 freedom, Python's overflow-checking was wholly broken. A new overflow-
4221 checking scheme attempts to repair that, but may not be reliable on all
4222 platforms (C doesn't seem to provide anything both useful and portable
4223 in this area anymore).
4224
Martin v. Löwis44f86962001-09-05 13:44:54 +00004225- Asynchronous timeout actions are available through the new class
4226 threading.Timer.
4227
Tim Peters78526162001-09-05 00:53:45 +00004228- math.log and math.log10 now return sensible results for even huge
4229 long arguments. For example, math.log10(10 ** 10000) ~= 10000.0.
4230
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004231- A new function, imp.lock_held(), returns 1 when the import lock is
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004232 currently held. See the docs for the imp module.
4233
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004234- pickle, cPickle and marshal on 32-bit platforms can now correctly read
Tim Peters82112372001-08-29 02:28:42 +00004235 dumps containing ints written on platforms where Python ints are 8 bytes.
4236 When read on a box where Python ints are 4 bytes, such values are
4237 converted to Python longs.
4238
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004239- In restricted execution mode (using the rexec module), unmarshalling
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004240 code objects is no longer allowed. This plugs a security hole.
4241
Steve Purcell6091cd62001-09-06 16:05:17 +00004242- unittest.TestResult instances no longer store references to tracebacks
4243 generated by test failures. This prevents unexpected dangling references
4244 to objects that should be garbage collected between tests.
4245
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004246Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004247-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004248
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004249- Tools/scripts/fixdiv.py has been added which can be used to fix
4250 division operators as per PEP 238.
4251
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004252Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004253-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004254
Barry Warsawd6c8ca62001-09-07 18:13:44 +00004255- If you are an adventurous person using Mac OS X you may want to look at
4256 Mac/OSX. There is a Makefile there that will build Python as a real Mac
4257 application, which can be used for experimenting with Carbon or Cocoa.
4258 Discussion of this on pythonmac-sig, please.
4259
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004260C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004261-----
Tim Peters7eea37e2001-09-04 22:08:56 +00004262
4263- New function PyObject_Dir(obj), like Python __builtin__.dir(obj).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004264
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004265- Note that PyLong_AsDouble can fail! This has always been true, but no
4266 callers checked for it. It's more likely to fail now, because overflow
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004267 errors are properly detected now. The proper way to check::
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004268
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004269 double x = PyLong_AsDouble(some_long_object);
4270 if (x == -1.0 && PyErr_Occurred()) {
Raymond Hettingeraf72d522002-12-29 20:14:11 +00004271 /* The conversion failed. */
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004272 }
Tim Peters9fffa3e2001-09-04 05:14:19 +00004273
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004274- The GC API has been changed. Extensions that use the old API will still
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004275 compile but will not participate in GC. To upgrade an extension
4276 module:
4277
4278 - rename Py_TPFLAGS_GC to PyTPFLAGS_HAVE_GC
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004279
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004280 - use PyObject_GC_New or PyObject_GC_NewVar to allocate objects and
4281 PyObject_GC_Del to deallocate them
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004282
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004283 - rename PyObject_GC_Init to PyObject_GC_Track and PyObject_GC_Fini
4284 to PyObject_GC_UnTrack
Tim Petersd507dab2001-08-30 20:51:59 +00004285
Neil Schemenauer4042c692001-08-30 15:38:01 +00004286 - remove PyGC_HEAD_SIZE from object size calculations
4287
4288 - remove calls to PyObject_AS_GC and PyObject_FROM_GC
4289
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004290- Two new functions: PyString_FromFormat() and PyString_FromFormatV().
Guido van Rossumae457142001-08-31 18:31:35 +00004291 These can be used safely to construct string objects from a
4292 sprintf-style format string (similar to the format string supported
4293 by PyErr_Format()).
Tim Peters69232342001-08-30 05:16:13 +00004294
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004295New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004296-------------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004297
Tim Petersb7da0902001-09-02 23:01:43 +00004298- Stephen Hansen contributed patches sufficient to get a clean compile
4299 under Borland C (Windows), but he reports problems running it and ran
4300 out of time to complete the port. Volunteers? Expect a MemoryError
4301 when importing the types module; this is probably shallow, and
4302 causing later failures too.
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004303
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004304Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004305-----
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004306
4307Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004308-------
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004309
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004310- Large file support is now enabled on Win32 platforms as well as on
4311 Win64. This means that, for example, you can use f.tell() and f.seek()
4312 to manipulate files larger than 2 gigabytes (provided you have enough
4313 disk space, and are using a Windows filesystem that supports large
Tim Peters9a9471c2001-09-11 23:18:51 +00004314 partitions). Windows filesystem limits: FAT has a 2GB (gigabyte)
4315 filesize limit, and large file support makes no difference there.
4316 FAT32's limit is 4GB, and files >= 2GB are easier to use from Python now.
4317 NTFS has no practical limit on file size, and files of any size can be
4318 used from Python now.
Tim Peters6e13a562001-09-06 00:32:15 +00004319
Tim Petersbdee63f2001-09-02 03:40:59 +00004320- The w9xpopen hack is now used on Windows NT and 2000 too when COMPSPEC
Tim Peters402d5982001-08-27 06:37:48 +00004321 points to command.com (patch from Brian Quinlan).
4322
Tim Petersedc99312001-08-22 21:36:50 +00004323
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004324What's New in Python 2.2a2?
4325===========================
4326
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004327*Release Date: 22-Aug-2001*
4328
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004329Build
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004330-----
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004331
Barry Warsaw18b2ecf2001-08-22 20:26:56 +00004332- Tim Peters developed a brand new Windows installer using Wise 8.1,
4333 generously donated to us by Wise Solutions.
4334
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004335- configure supports a new option --enable-unicode, with the values
4336 ucs2 and ucs4 (new in 2.2a1). With --disable-unicode, the Unicode
4337 type and supporting code is completely removed from the interpreter.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004338
Jack Jansen32ce0cd2001-08-21 19:28:20 +00004339- A new configure option --enable-framework builds a Mac OS X framework,
4340 which "make frameworkinstall" will install. This provides a starting
4341 point for more mac-like functionality, join pythonmac-sig@python.org
4342 if you are interested in helping.
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004343
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004344- The NeXT platform is no longer supported.
4345
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004346- The 'new' module is now statically linked.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004347
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004348Tools
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004349-----
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004350
4351- The new Tools/scripts/cleanfuture.py can be used to automatically
Andrew M. Kuchlingb0532092001-08-15 15:54:56 +00004352 edit out obsolete future statements from Python source code. See
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004353 the module docstring for details.
4354
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004355Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004356-----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004357
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004358- regrtest.py now knows which tests are expected to be skipped on some
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004359 platforms, allowing to give clearer test result output. regrtest
4360 also has optional --use/-u switch to run normally disabled tests
4361 which require network access or consume significant disk resources.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004362
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004363- Several new tests in the standard test suite, with special thanks to
4364 Nick Mathewson.
4365
4366Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004367----
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004368
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004369- The floor division operator // has been added as outlined in PEP
4370 238. The / operator still provides classic division (and will until
4371 Python 3.0) unless "from __future__ import division" is included, in
4372 which case the / operator will provide true division. The operator
4373 module provides truediv() and floordiv() functions. Augmented
4374 assignment variants are included, as are the equivalent overloadable
4375 methods and C API methods. See the PEP for a full discussion:
4376 <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0238.html>
4377
Tim Peters6cd6a822001-08-17 22:11:27 +00004378- Future statements are now effective in simulated interactive shells
4379 (like IDLE). This should "just work" by magic, but read Michael
4380 Hudson's "Future statements in simulated shells" PEP 264 for full
4381 details: <http://python.sf.net/peps/pep-0264.html>.
4382
Guido van Rossumf86ddd22001-08-17 21:21:04 +00004383- The type/class unification (PEP 252-253) was integrated into the
4384 trunk and is not so tentative any more (the exact specification of
4385 some features is still tentative). A lot of work has done on fixing
4386 bugs and adding robustness and features (performance still has to
4387 come a long way).
4388
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004389- Warnings about a mismatch in the Python API during extension import
4390 now use the Python warning framework (which makes it possible to
4391 write filters for these warnings).
4392
Barry Warsaw9b3be7f2001-08-14 18:35:02 +00004393- A function's __dict__ (aka func_dict) will now always be a
4394 dictionary. It used to be possible to delete it or set it to None,
4395 but now both actions raise TypeErrors. It is still legal to set it
4396 to a dictionary object. Getting func.__dict__ before any attributes
4397 have been assigned now returns an empty dictionary instead of None.
4398
Guido van Rossum32aa5d22001-09-05 18:43:35 +00004399- A new command line option, -E, was added which disables the use of
4400 all environment variables, or at least those that are specifically
4401 significant to Python. Usually those have a name starting with
4402 "PYTHON". This was used to fix a problem where the tests fail if
4403 the user happens to have PYTHONHOME or PYTHONPATH pointing to an
4404 older distribution.
4405
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004406Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004407-------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004408
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004409- New class Differ and new functions ndiff() and restore() in difflib.py.
4410 These package the algorithms used by the popular Tools/scripts/ndiff.py,
Tim Peters0afb6092001-08-15 06:06:44 +00004411 for programmatic reuse.
Tim Peters5e824c32001-08-12 22:25:01 +00004412
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004413- New function xml.sax.saxutils.quoteattr(): Quote an XML attribute
4414 value using the minimal quoting required for the value; more
4415 reliable than using xml.sax.saxutils.escape() for attribute values.
4416
4417- Readline completion support for cmd.Cmd was added.
4418
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004419- Calling os.tempnam() or os.tmpnam() generate RuntimeWarnings.
4420
4421- Added function threading.BoundedSemaphore()
4422
4423- Added Ka-Ping Yee's cgitb.py module.
4424
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004425- The 'new' module now exposes the CO_xxx flags.
Barry Warsaw6f3410d2001-08-22 04:08:41 +00004426
Martin v. Löwis560da622001-11-24 09:24:51 +00004427- The gc module offers the get_referents function.
4428
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004429New platforms
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004430-------------
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004431
4432C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004433-----
Marc-André Lemburgd6277912001-07-31 14:42:42 +00004434
Marc-André Lemburg888fac02001-07-31 14:24:31 +00004435- Two new APIs PyOS_snprintf() and PyOS_vsnprintf() were added
4436 which provide a cross-platform implementations for the
4437 relatively new snprintf()/vsnprintf() C lib APIs. In contrast to
4438 the standard sprintf() and vsprintf() C lib APIs, these versions
4439 apply bounds checking on the used buffer which enhances protection
4440 against buffer overruns.
4441
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004442- Unicode APIs now use name mangling to assure that mixing interpreters
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004443 and extensions using different Unicode widths is rendered next to
4444 impossible. Trying to import an incompatible Unicode-aware extension
Marc-André Lemburg48dbfe92001-07-31 14:37:40 +00004445 will result in an ImportError. Unicode extensions writers must make
4446 sure to check the Unicode width compatibility in their extensions by
4447 using at least one of the mangled Unicode APIs in the extension.
4448
Martin v. Löwis339d0f72001-08-17 18:39:25 +00004449- Two new flags METH_NOARGS and METH_O are available in method definition
4450 tables to simplify implementation of methods with no arguments and a
4451 single untyped argument. Calling such methods is more efficient than
4452 calling corresponding METH_VARARGS methods. METH_OLDARGS is now
4453 deprecated.
4454
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004455Windows
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004456-------
Tim Petersc1731372001-08-04 08:12:36 +00004457
4458- "import module" now compiles module.pyw if it exists and nothing else
4459 relevant is found.
4460
Tim Peters20f51a72001-07-21 02:31:40 +00004461
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004462What's New in Python 2.2a1?
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004463===========================
4464
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004465*Release date: 18-Jul-2001*
4466
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004467Core
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004468----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004469
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004470- TENTATIVELY, a large amount of code implementing much of what's
4471 described in PEP 252 (Making Types Look More Like Classes) and PEP
4472 253 (Subtyping Built-in Types) was added. This will be released
4473 with Python 2.2a1. Documentation will be provided separately
4474 through http://www.python.org/2.2/. The purpose of releasing this
4475 with Python 2.2a1 is to test backwards compatibility. It is
4476 possible, though not likely, that a decision is made not to release
4477 this code as part of 2.2 final, if any serious backwards
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004478 incompatibilities are found during alpha testing that cannot be
Tim Peters6d6c1a32001-08-02 04:15:00 +00004479 repaired.
4480
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004481- Generators were added; this is a new way to create an iterator (see
Tim Peters11a0d102001-07-17 18:48:00 +00004482 below) using what looks like a simple function containing one or
Guido van Rossum55a78992001-07-17 17:22:32 +00004483 more 'yield' statements. See PEP 255. Since this adds a new
4484 keyword to the language, this feature must be enabled by including a
4485 future statement: "from __future__ import generators" (see PEP 236).
4486 Generators will become a standard feature in a future release
4487 (probably 2.3). Without this future statement, 'yield' remains an
4488 ordinary identifier, but a warning is issued each time it is used.
4489 (These warnings currently don't conform to the warnings framework of
4490 PEP 230; we intend to fix this in 2.2a2.)
4491
Marc-André Lemburg12e74b32001-05-22 08:58:23 +00004492- The UTF-16 codec was modified to be more RFC compliant. It will now
4493 only remove BOM characters at the start of the string and then
4494 only if running in native mode (UTF-16-LE and -BE won't remove a
4495 leading BMO character).
4496
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004497- Strings now have a new method .decode() to complement the already
4498 existing .encode() method. These two methods provide direct access
4499 to the corresponding decoders and encoders of the registered codecs.
4500
4501 To enhance the usability of the .encode() method, the special
4502 casing of Unicode object return values was dropped (Unicode objects
4503 were auto-magically converted to string using the default encoding).
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004504
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004505 Both methods will now return whatever the codec in charge of the
4506 requested encoding returns as object, e.g. Unicode codecs will
4507 return Unicode objects when decoding is requested ("äöü".decode("latin-1")
4508 will return u"äöü"). This enables codec writer to create codecs
4509 for various simple to use conversions.
4510
4511 New codecs were added to demonstrate these new features (the .encode()
4512 and .decode() columns indicate the type of the returned objects):
4513
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004514 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4515 |Name | .encode() | .decode() | Description |
4516 +=========+===========+===========+=============================+
4517 |uu | string | string | UU codec (e.g. for email) |
4518 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4519 |base64 | string | string | base64 codec |
4520 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4521 |quopri | string | string | quoted-printable codec |
4522 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4523 |zlib | string | string | zlib compression |
4524 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4525 |hex | string | string | 2-byte hex codec |
4526 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
4527 |rot-13 | string | Unicode | ROT-13 Unicode charmap codec|
4528 +---------+-----------+-----------+-----------------------------+
Marc-André Lemburgfab96cc2001-05-15 18:38:45 +00004529
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004530- Some operating systems now support the concept of a default Unicode
4531 encoding for file system operations. Notably, Windows supports 'mbcs'
4532 as the default. The Macintosh will also adopt this concept in the medium
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004533 term, although the default encoding for that platform will be other than
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004534 'mbcs'.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004535
4536 On operating system that support non-ASCII filenames, it is common for
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004537 functions that return filenames (such as os.listdir()) to return Python
4538 string objects pre-encoded using the default file system encoding for
4539 the platform. As this encoding is likely to be different from Python's
4540 default encoding, converting this name to a Unicode object before passing
4541 it back to the Operating System would result in a Unicode error, as Python
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004542 would attempt to use its default encoding (generally ASCII) rather than
4543 the default encoding for the file system.
Guido van Rossum1bd797a2001-05-14 13:53:38 +00004544
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004545 In general, this change simply removes surprises when working with
4546 Unicode and the file system, making these operations work as you expect,
4547 increasing the transparency of Unicode objects in this context.
Mark Hammond2a0af792001-05-14 03:09:36 +00004548 See [????] for more details, including examples.
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004549
Tim Peters61dff2b2001-05-08 15:43:37 +00004550- Float (and complex) literals in source code were evaluated to full
4551 precision only when running from a .py file; the same code loaded from a
4552 .pyc (or .pyo) file could suffer numeric differences starting at about the
4553 12th significant decimal digit. For example, on a machine with IEEE-754
4554 floating arithmetic,
4555
4556 x = 9007199254740992.0
4557 print long(x)
4558
4559 printed 9007199254740992 if run directly from .py, but 9007199254740000
4560 if from a compiled (.pyc or .pyo) file. This was due to marshal using
4561 str(float) instead of repr(float) when building code objects. marshal
4562 now uses repr(float) instead, which should reproduce floats to full
4563 machine precision (assuming the platform C float<->string I/O conversion
4564 functions are of good quality).
4565
4566 This may cause floating-point results to change in some cases, and
4567 usually for the better, but may also cause numerically unstable
4568 algorithms to break.
4569
Tim Peters2f228e72001-05-13 00:19:31 +00004570- The implementation of dicts suffers fewer collisions, which has speed
4571 benefits. However, the order in which dict entries appear in dict.keys(),
4572 dict.values() and dict.items() may differ from previous releases for a
4573 given dict. Nothing is defined about this order, so no program should
4574 rely on it. Nevertheless, it's easy to write test cases that rely on the
4575 order by accident, typically because of printing the str() or repr() of a
4576 dict to an "expected results" file. See Lib/test/test_support.py's new
4577 sortdict(dict) function for a simple way to display a dict in sorted
4578 order.
4579
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004580- Many other small changes to dicts were made, resulting in faster
4581 operation along the most common code paths.
4582
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004583- Dictionary objects now support the "in" operator: "x in dict" means
4584 the same as dict.has_key(x).
4585
Barry Warsaw51acc8d2001-06-26 20:12:50 +00004586- The update() method of dictionaries now accepts generic mapping
4587 objects. Specifically the argument object must support the .keys()
4588 and __getitem__() methods. This allows you to say, for example,
4589 {}.update(UserDict())
4590
Guido van Rossum10315822001-05-01 20:54:30 +00004591- Iterators were added; this is a generalized way of providing values
4592 to a for loop. See PEP 234. There's a new built-in function iter()
4593 to return an iterator. There's a new protocol to get the next value
4594 from an iterator using the next() method (in Python) or the
4595 tp_iternext slot (in C). There's a new protocol to get iterators
4596 using the __iter__() method (in Python) or the tp_iter slot (in C).
4597 Iterating (i.e. a for loop) over a dictionary generates its keys.
4598 Iterating over a file generates its lines.
4599
Tim Petersf553f892001-05-01 20:45:31 +00004600- The following functions were generalized to work nicely with iterator
Skip Montanaroa2a07bc2002-09-30 15:23:01 +00004601 arguments::
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004602
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004603 map(), filter(), reduce(), zip()
Tim Peters8572b4f2001-05-06 01:05:02 +00004604 list(), tuple() (PySequence_Tuple() and PySequence_Fast() in C API)
4605 max(), min()
Tim Peters1af03e92001-05-26 19:37:54 +00004606 join() method of strings
4607 extend() method of lists
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004608 'x in y' and 'x not in y' (PySequence_Contains() in C API)
4609 operator.countOf() (PySequence_Count() in C API)
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004610 right-hand side of assignment statements with multiple targets, such as ::
Tim Petersd6d010b2001-06-21 02:49:55 +00004611 x, y, z = some_iterable_object_returning_exactly_3_values
Tim Peters75f8e352001-05-05 11:33:43 +00004612
Tim Petersd85e1022001-05-11 21:51:48 +00004613- Accessing module attributes is significantly faster (for example,
4614 random.random or os.path or yourPythonModule.yourAttribute).
4615
Tim Peterse63415e2001-05-08 04:38:29 +00004616- Comparing dictionary objects via == and != is faster, and now works even
4617 if the keys and values don't support comparisons other than ==.
4618
Tim Peters95bf9392001-05-10 08:32:44 +00004619- Comparing dictionaries in ways other than == and != is slower: there were
4620 insecurities in the dict comparison implementation that could cause Python
4621 to crash if the element comparison routines for the dict keys and/or
4622 values mutated the dicts. Making the code bulletproof slowed it down.
4623
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004624- Collisions in dicts are resolved via a new approach, which can help
4625 dramatically in bad cases. For example, looking up every key in a dict
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004626 d with d.keys() == [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] is approximately 500x
Tim Peterseb28ef22001-06-02 05:27:19 +00004627 faster now. Thanks to Christian Tismer for pointing out the cause and
4628 the nature of an effective cure (last December! better late than never).
Tim Peters15d49292001-05-27 07:39:22 +00004629
Tim Peters52e155e2001-06-16 05:42:57 +00004630- repr() is much faster for large containers (dict, list, tuple).
4631
4632
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004633Library
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004634-------
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004635
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004636- The constants ascii_letters, ascii_lowercase. and ascii_uppercase
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004637 were added to the string module. These a locale-independent
Fred Drake960fdf92001-07-20 18:38:26 +00004638 constants, unlike letters, lowercase, and uppercase. These are now
4639 use in appropriate locations in the standard library.
4640
Martin v. Löwisf0473d52001-07-18 16:17:16 +00004641- The flags used in dlopen calls can now be configured using
4642 sys.setdlopenflags and queried using sys.getdlopenflags.
4643
Guido van Rossumc7e4aca2001-07-12 11:54:37 +00004644- Fredrik Lundh's xmlrpclib is now a standard library module. This
4645 provides full client-side XML-RPC support. In addition,
4646 Demo/xmlrpc/ contains two server frameworks (one SocketServer-based,
4647 one asyncore-based). Thanks to Eric Raymond for the documentation.
4648
Guido van Rossum643d3912001-07-05 14:46:25 +00004649- The xrange() object is simplified: it no longer supports slicing,
4650 repetition, comparisons, efficient 'in' checking, the tolist()
4651 method, or the start, stop and step attributes. See PEP 260.
4652
Martin v. Löwisebf94db2001-06-06 06:25:40 +00004653- A new function fnmatch.filter to filter lists of file names was added.
4654
Barry Warsawffd674d2001-05-22 16:00:10 +00004655- calendar.py uses month and day names based on the current locale.
4656
Guido van Rossum2e0a6542001-05-15 02:14:44 +00004657- strop is now *really* obsolete (this was announced before with 1.6),
4658 and issues DeprecationWarning when used (except for the four items
4659 that are still imported into string.py).
4660
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004661- Cookie.py now sorts key+value pairs by key in output strings.
4662
4663- pprint.isrecursive(object) didn't correctly identify recursive objects.
4664 Now it does.
4665
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004666- pprint functions now much faster for large containers (tuple, list, dict).
4667
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004668- New 'q' and 'Q' format codes in the struct module, corresponding to C
4669 types "long long" and "unsigned long long" (on Windows, __int64). In
4670 native mode, these can be used only when the platform C compiler supports
4671 these types (when HAVE_LONG_LONG is #define'd by the Python config
4672 process), and then they inherit the sizes and alignments of the C types.
Tim Peters7a3bfc32001-06-12 01:22:22 +00004673 In standard mode, 'q' and 'Q' are supported on all platforms, and are
4674 8-byte integral types.
Tim Peters7b9542a2001-06-10 23:40:19 +00004675
Guido van Rossum83213cc2001-06-12 16:48:52 +00004676- The site module installs a new built-in function 'help' that invokes
4677 pydoc.help. It must be invoked as 'help()'; when invoked as 'help',
4678 it displays a message reminding the user to use 'help()' or
4679 'help(object)'.
4680
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004681Tests
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004682-----
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004683
4684- New test_mutants.py runs dict comparisons where the key and value
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004685 comparison operators mutate the dicts randomly during comparison. This
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004686 rapidly causes Python to crash under earlier releases (not for the faint
4687 of heart: it can also cause Win9x to freeze or reboot!).
4688
Raymond Hettingerf2f2a2c2002-08-19 14:25:03 +00004689- New test_pprint.py verifies that pprint.isrecursive() and
Tim Peters95b3f782001-05-14 18:39:41 +00004690 pprint.isreadable() return sensible results. Also verifies that simple
4691 cases produce correct output.
Tim Petersa814db52001-05-14 07:05:58 +00004692
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004693C API
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004694-----
Tim Peters4324aa32001-05-28 22:30:08 +00004695
4696- Removed the unused last_is_sticky argument from the internal
4697 _PyTuple_Resize(). If this affects you, you were cheating.
Skip Montanaroe5d7f7f2002-09-20 14:16:59 +00004698
4699----
4700
4701**(For information about older versions, consult the HISTORY file.)**